Phoronix Test Suite 1.6.0 "Tydal" Beta 2

As what will likely be the last development release in the 1.6 "Tydal" series, Beta 2 has now been made available. Among the changes to pts-core are a few hardware and software detection improvements, test installation logs are now archived within the test installation directory, an install-all-dependencies option has been added, and there is now support for reading the CPU usage of individual processing cores (and is also supported through the system_monitor module).

When it comes to the tests, a build-mysql test profile has been added that will time the build of MySQL 5.1. A graphics-magick test profile has also been added that tests various GraphicsMagick functions. Due to its use of OpenMP, the graphics-magick test profile is great for multi-core environments. The specviewperf10 test profile for SPECViewPerf10 has also been updated. With suites, a system-disk test suite has been added.

The bilde_renderer drawing API that's used to generate the result graphs has also received several improvements. Operations for draw_polygon() and draw_ellipse() have been added to the API and have been implemented within the available renderers. An experimental renderer has also been added to render the graphs to an Adobe Flash / SWF file. This SWF rendering is done using the Ming library. The bilde_renderer API has been fully implemented with SWF, but there is currently an odd alignment bug causing some drawing objects to be offset. A JPEG renderer has also been added for those that prefer to use JPEG files instead of PNG as the default format.

Besides the above mentioned work there is quite a few other changes too. The Phoronix Test Suite 1.6.0 Beta 2 change-log is listed below. The final release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.6.0 "Tydal" will likely come later this month. To download the latest development release visit the download page.

Phoronix Test Suite 1.6.0 Beta 2
January 2, 2009

- pts-core: Improve size detection of low-capacity hard disks
- pts-core: Improve lspci support for distributions using /sbin/lspci (such as OpenSuSE)
- pts-core: Move base test profiles and resources to pts/base-test-profiles/ and pts/base-test-resources/
- pts-core: Improve motherboard southbridge detection for some Intel ICH Chipsets
- pts-core: Add pts_test_installed() boolean function
- pts-core: Add pts_installed_test_tandem_XmlReader object
- pts-core: Clean up Display / X.Org server reported string
- pts-core: Eliminate use of most preg_ functions
- pts-core: Archive installation output of tests in the test's directory in file install.log
- pts-core: Add install-all-dependencies option to install all available external dependencies for that distribution
- pts-core: When installing or running a test, only print to standard output if under 10KB
- pts-core: Rewrite pts_remove() function
- pts-core: Allow reading CPU usage percent from individual cores
- pts-core: Cache reading of hw_cpu_core_count() since that shouldn't change while pts-core is running
- pts-core: Add auto-removable-media field to auto test options support
- pts: Add UXA acceleration check to GtkPerf test note reporting
- pts: Add 2d-test base profile that reports 2D acceleration mode using Cascading Test Profiles
- pts: Add build-mysql test profile for timed build of MySQL 5.1
- pts: Add system-disk test suite for real world disk / encryption tests
- pts: Add libperl-dev to Ubuntu External Dependencies XML to perl package
- pts: Add photo-sample base test profile for providing sample photographs
- pts: Add graphics-magick test profile for GraphicsMagick 1.3 image testing
- pts: Add graphics-magick to multicore test suite due to its use of OpenMP
- pts: Update lzma download link for compress-lzma test profile
- pts: Adjust more test profiles from using $argv to $LOG_FILE
- pts: Update and fix specviewperf10 test profile
- pts: Update wine-unstable test profile to WINE v1.1.12
- pts_Graph: Tweak formatting of basic graph attributes
- pts_Graph: When rendering a graph on a percent basis, format scale for 100-point basis
- pts_Graph: Add more stock colors to painter
- bilde_renderer: Add and implement draw_polygon and draw_ellipse to drawing API
- bilde_renderer: When setting the image quality level to use with the render_image() function, base it on a 100-point scale
- bilde_renderer: Add support for dynamically resizing the image drawing buffer
- bilde_renderer: Add experimental Adobe Flash / SWF renderer
- bilde_renderer: Add a generic abstract GD library renderer and then have bilde_png_renderer extend that
- bilde_renderer: Add a JPEG renderer using the GD library
- system_monitor: When monitoring CPU usage, monitor the usage on each individual core (and still overall too)