Phoronix Test Suite 3.8-Bygland Officially Arrives

Phoronix Test Suite 3.8-Bygland has been officially released with many new features to enhance the Linux benchmarking experience.

Many of the key Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 features have already been talked about in previous articles like Making Compiler, Disk Testing More Reproducible, Bringing Up Advancements In Compiler Testing, Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 Update Pokes OS X 10.8, and More Interactive Graphs For Benchmarks. Bygland is the final major update before the release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 later in the year. Overall, 3.8 has shaped up to be a really great release.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 is available for download from Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. Many of the improvements have already been merged into the public version of OpenBenchmarking.org.

The documentation has also seen some additions this cycle, so if you've never used this Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / OS X / Hurd benchmarking client previously, refer to the PDF documentation.

Here is the press release concerning key items of Phoronix Test Suite 3.8-Bygland while listed below is the official change-log between 3.6-Arendal and 3.8-Bygland.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.8.0-Bygland
19 March 2012

- pts-core: Support longer titles on result files (64 characters expanded on OpenBenchmarking.org)
- pts-core: Wine/Windows fixes for items reported by Stefan Dösinger
- pts-core: Minor improvement for analyzing compiler option string differences
- pts-core: Fix for result file analyzing sometimes not returning hardware changes
- pts-core: Better handling for detecting Wine trackers / other trackers using a mix of short SHA1s
- phodevi: Support for determining and appending release dates on GCC snapshots/pre-releases

Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 Milestone 3
13 March 2012

- pts-core: Introduce a look-aside download cache that automatically checks other existing test installations for needed files
- pts-core: Support a last-minute look-aside copy if a previous test in the install queue downloaded the same file
- pts-core: Attempt to detect when any test ends prematurely with an invalid result
- pts-core: Begin reporting test installation compiler attributes from test profiles to the JSON in new result file XML schema
- pts-core: Remove timestamps from captured log files
- pts-core: Support system JSON for each identifier in the result file XML schema
- pts-core: Fix save name issue when dealing with dashes mixed with spaces in save name
- pts-core: Pass compiler options to graphs for reporting
- pts-core: Report compiler configuration (GCC's "Configured with") to test system table when it changes between runs in a result file
- pts-core: Report disk scheduler / mount options to test system table when disk tests are contained in result file
- pts_Graph: Add support for reporting test notes to graphs
- pts_Graph: Restore links within tables for the new pts_Graph table SVG DOM IR
- pts_Graph: Fix for key not appearing on overview graph
- pts_Graph: Embed PTS and OpenBenchmarking.org logos locally within SVG
- pts_Graph: Support for representing web links on images within the new SVG DOM IR
- pts_Graph: Support for word-wrapping test notes with long lines
- phodevi: Fix for Linux memory module count decoding in niche cases on multi-socket systems
- phodevi: Support for detecting all file-system mount options on test install path
- phodevi: Initial work towards Minix 3.2.0 operating system support
- graphics_event_checker: Rewrite of the graphics event checker and enable by default on new installs

Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 Milestone 2
20 February 2012

- pts-core: Allow up to 1MB of system log files to be attached and uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org
- pts-core: Fix test profile / test suite identifier base name parsing on version handling
- pts-core: Add cairo-development as an external dependency for Cairo drawing library development
- pts-core: Initial support for compiler masking / compiler option intercepting on test installation
- pts-core: Support symlinked ~/.drirc to test install directories
- pts-core: Support for Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" Developer Preview 1
- phodevi: Better recognition of Samsung disk drives
- phodevi: NVIDIA CUDA (nvcc) detection and report it to system information compiler area
- phodevi: Detection support for Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization server
- phodevi: Detection support for Parallels Virtualization
- phodevi: Better VMware DDX driver detection when using vmwgfx
- phodevi: Support for detecting VirtualBox version using vboxguest kernel module information
- phodevi: Support for detecting Portland Group (PGI) Workstation compilers
- phodevi: Improved detection of Hitachi disk drives
- phodevi: Support for Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" Developer Preview 1
- pts_Graph: Rendering corrections of SVG DOM IR

Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 Milestone 1
17 January 2012

- pts-core: When time-zone is not set in PHP, attempt to query it from the host system
- pts-core: Fix for handling user variable swaps on the result identifier
- pts-core: Major enhancements to MATISK testing module
- pts-core: Fix for some hardware/software comparisons being turned into line graphs
- pts-core: Dump some common / important environmental variables to system log area
- pts-core: Migrate to a JSON-based graph configuration file at ~/.phoronix-test-suite/graph-config.json
- pts_Graph: New version of pts_Graph that uses SVG DOM IR directly
- pts-core: Allow pts_svg_dom to be converted to JPEG/PNG using new library as bilde_renderer replacement
- phodevi: Add some fall-back graphics detection support of Texas Instruments OMAP / Samsung EXYNOS
- phodevi: Fall-back graphics detection support for the ARM Mali
- phodevi: NVIDIA TEGRA hardware detection improvements (as tested on a TEGRA-2 CompuLab TrimSlice)
- phodevi: Further fall-back support for further detecting EXT3/EXT4 file-system from user-space
- phodevi: Improve Arch Linux OS detection on at least ARM platforms
- phodevi: Screen resolution fall-back of reading frame-buffer virtual size
- phodevi: Improved Intel chipset detection parsing from Xorg.0.log when /sys/kernel/debug/ isn't readable
- installer: Installer update

Stay tuned for information concerning Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 developments in the coming weeks.