The First Milestone Of Phoronix Test Suite "Arendal"

The first milestone/development release of the major Phoronix Test Suite 3.6-Arendal update is now available. The official release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.6 is due out this quarter.

It's only been one month since releasing Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand, but already accumulated is a number of commits for the 3.6-Arendal release this quarter. In particular there is heavy work on Phodevi (the Phoronix Device Library), continued improvements to pts_Graph (the graphing component of the Phoronix Test Suite), and pts-core itself. There's also been a horde of improvements going on to OpenBenchmarking.org for those who haven't already noticed.

When it comes to the software/hardware detection provided by Phodevi, in Phoronix Test Suite 3.6-Arendal Milestone 1 there are the following highlighted improvements:

- Greater detection of CPU features on the test system (e.g. AVX extensions, SSE4.2/SSE5, Energy Performance Bias, etc) and these flags can be viewed for reference by running the new phoronix-test-suite detailed-system-info command.
- Better cleansing of hardware model strings for certain products.
- Improved reporting and detection for AMD Bulldozer/FX series.
- A new Phodevi sensor (exposed as "cpu.power") has been added for reading the current CPU power consumption of AMD Bulldozer/FX (Family 15h) processors via the Linux hwmon fam15h_power driver.
- Virtualization detection improvements for VirtualBox and Xen DomU guests.
- Improvements for LLVM/Clang 3.0.
- Enhanced system RAM detection in certain scenarios on Linux and Solaris/Illumos operating systems.

With the Phoronix Test Suite graphs there are various improvements, in particular for the generated line graphs. Another non-pts-core improvement in Arendal Milestone 1 is support on GNOME3 for toggling the monitor/display settings when on AC power to prevent screen blanking during tests with the "toggle_screen" module.

In pts-core there are code clean-ups, command improvements, the detailed-system-info command, regression fixes, and more.

Like the other Phoronix Test Suite 3.x codenames, Phoronix Test Suite 3.6-Arendal is codenamed after another town in the county of Aust-Agder, Norway.

More details on features and other work planned for Phoronix Test Suite 3.6 and OpenBenchmarking.org will be revealed in the coming days (I also routinely tweet new development updates from @MichaelLarabel). For anyone using the Phoronix Test Suite (whether it be for personal or business reasons) and would like to meet-up and learn more, contact us. I will also be at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando later this month. Additionally, I will be back to Germany/Austria in the last few weeks of November (mainly Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Nürnberg, Munich, and Vienna).

Bug reports and feature requests are always welcome. Try out the latest Phoronix Test Suite release by downloading the GPLv3-licensed software at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.6 Milestone 1
20 October 2011

- pts-core: Code clean-ups
- pts-core: Allow results to be rendered in reverse order
- pts-core: Add detailed-system-info command for reporting more system attributes
- pts-core: Fix regression of NO_EXTERNAL_DEPENDENCIES and NO_PHODEVI_CACHE not working
- pts-core: Add dump-openbenchmarking-indexes option for debugging
- pts-core: Fix for extract-from-result-file not correctly formatting the new saved results name
- phodevi: No longer report if CPU power savings (CnQ, EIST, etc) is active since it's now widespread across all desktop hardware
- phodevi: Improve detection of low RAM capacities (1GB)
- phodevi: Add support for detecting greater CPU features
- phodevi: Improve system memory detection on Solaris/Illumos operating systems
- phodevi: Improve disk device detection on Solaris/Illumos operating systems
- phodevi: Ensure no words in motherboard identifier string are repeated
- phodevi: Don't print lspci errors
- phodevi: Few string reporting tweaks found from AMD Bulldozer FX system
- phodevi: Virtualization detection support for Xen DomU guests
- phodevi: Detect VirtualBox version from guest VM
- phodevi: Expose a cpu.power sensor that provides monitoring of CPU power consumption (new feature to AMD 15h Bulldozer CPUs)
- phodevi: Convert CPU model strings like 'Intel Core i7 M 620' to 'Intel Core i7 620M' to better reflect Intel product marketing names
- phodevi: Basic ICC detection
- phodevi: Improvements to LLVM/Clang version detection and code revision reporting
- pts_Graph: Allow disconnected lines of results on line graphs
- pts_Graph: Plot entire lines of data on line graphs when there are no identifiers
- pts_Graph: Fix for the averages on line graphs not appearing
- toggle_screensaver: Support for toggling the GNOME3 AC display settings