Phoronix Test Suite 4.4 Enhances For Mac OS X, F2FS

The third development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.4-Forsand is now available. Incorporated into this latest development snapshot are enhancements for improving the Apple OS X benchmarking support, detection of the new Linux F2FS file-system, and other improvements.

Already in the development of "Forsand" have been a number of new features from enhanced error reporting to support checks and new capabilities, enhanced Wine benchmarks (indirectly) with OpenBenchmarking.org, and BSD benchmarking improvements. With Phoronix Test Suite 4.4 Milestone 3, there's even more improvements.

- The external dependencies handling for test profiles to install necessary OS/platform dependencies has received a major overhaul in Forsand. The improvements make the dependency handling much more versatile and accommodating for out-of-tree packages, alternative compilers and other components, and supportive of Linux distributions and operating systems that haven't been "officially" tested with the Phoronix Test Suite. For users of existing tested distributions to the Phoronix Test Suite, dependency resolution and other operations are now handled faster too.

- Initial support for using MacPorts for dependency management on Apple Mac OS X platforms. This will allow for more OpenBenchmarking.org test profiles to function with the Phoronix Test Suite. More OS X improvements and test profile verification will happen with the next Phoronix Test Suite 4.4 release while Milestone 3 is just prepping this MacPorts handling.

- Improvements to the appropriate displaying of compiler flags/switches on the result graphs for various computational benchmarks.

- The new F2FS file-system developed by Samsung as the "Flash Friendly File-System" for Linux is now properly detected based upon its magic number in the super block. The F2FS file-system is being introduced in the Linux 3.8 kernel. (Yes, coming soon on Phoronix.com are F2FS benchmarks.)

- The Cryptfs, AuFS, LustreFS, and Panasas PanFS file-systems are also now properly detected too by Phodevi, the Phoronix Device Interface library.

- Processors capable of supporting AVX2 (Advanced Vector Extensions 2) are now recognized with this attribute, such as Intel Haswell and Broadwell processors.

- Various other minor enhancements and bug-fixes.

The latest release of the Phoronix Test Suite is available for download at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. The official release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.4 will happen before the end of Q1.