Phoronix Test Suite 4.0-Suldal Milestone 4

After being in development for one month since the release of Suldal Milestone 3, the fourth development release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 was made available on Friday.

Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 "Suldal" is gearing up for release this summer. Due to the changes in going from Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 to 4.0, there isn't a Q2'2012 Phoronix Test Suite update but 4.0 should be officially released as the Q3 update by late July or early August. The Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 client is in good shape but there's some remaining work that needs to be completed to OpenBenchmarking.org (some new end-user features!) before declaring the official 4.0 release.

Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 Milestone 4 should be in good shape for use by anyone and in fact can be pushed to distribution repositories, etc if the deadline for your feature/new-package window is closing soon. Milestone 4 is effectively a preview/beta release with not really any fundamental changes planned before going gold.

I had hoped to have the new Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org Live Linux operating system ready for release at the same time as Phoronix Test Suite 4.0, but it looks like that may be delayed to Phoronix Test Suite 4.2 by early Q4. I have a really compelling user-interface for it figured out and being worked on but alas is taking longer than expected to nail down and ensure it will be a really exciting operating system for Linux benchmarking with a completely standardized stack and also offering up some other nifty features. There's also some other changes on the client-end to make Phoronix Test Suite 4.2 another interesting release with more new features.

Below are the official changes for the fourth milestone, although there were a lot more changes that went into this release, just not worth documenting for end-users at this time.

Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 Milestone 4
29 June 2012

- pts-core: Support download caches at /run/media/*/*/download-cache/
- pts-core: Set SKIP_TEST_SUPPORT_CHECKS=1 environment variable for debugging purposes to run tests on unsupported platforms
- pts_Graph: Only render as much room for pts_OverViewGraph as there are for what will be rendered (bar graph values)
- phodevi: Ensure DVD drives don't get reported on BSD operating systems when requesting disk drives
- phodevi: Improve graphics processor detection on Solaris 11 11/11 for non-NVIDIA GPUs
- system_monitor: Add support for handling i915_energy monitor reading in microJoules for each test run
- system_monitor: Place timer support for individual test runs within the module

See the other Suldal articles for more information on Phoronix Test Suite 4.0. Download at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. Thanks for benchmarking!