Four Days And There's A New PTS Lenvik Beta

I had intended for Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 Beta 2 to be the last development build for this release codenamed Lenvik, but things have changed. After continuing to do intensive, last minute work on Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 since the Lenvik Beta 2 release four days ago, a third beta has been warranted.

Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 Beta 3 brings more *BSD operating system improvements, Phodevi sensor improvements, faster reading of the sysfs interface through Phodevi, faster and smarter reference system comparisons, and the networking code has been rewritten. The new networking code used for communicating with Phoronix Global, Phoromatic, and downloading test files/dependencies is cleaner and more portable than the pts-core networking code up to this point that had an underlying dependence on wget/curl. This new networking code has also been a prerequisite for the Phoronix Test Suite Windows support and will also be of benefit to those benchmarking on mobile phones and embedded systems. There are also a variety of bug-fixes in Phodevi and pts-core with Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 Beta 3.

When it comes to test profiles, many test profiles have been updated with new download links for the test files now that pts-core is able to automatically detect broken/changed URLs with its new networking code. There are also two new test profiles, one that times how long it takes to unpack the Linux kernel source-code and the other is also a file-system test and that's for Oracle CompileBench.

Try out this latest development build of Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 "Lenvik" now at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. The plan is to provide the official release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 "Lenvik" next Tuesday, the 2nd of February. The release plan for PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 (codenamed "Anzhofen") is to publicly release that Linux live benchmarking OS the week leading up to our benchmarking talk at the Southern California Linux Expo (19 Feb). If sufficient changes have landed prior to the release of PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 (and we are still waiting on new test profiles from three other companies at present), a Phoronix Test Suite 2.4.1 release will also be made at that time.

Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 Beta 3
January 25, 2010

- pts-core: When running on BSD with Linux binary compatibility loaded, download the Linux-specific files for a test too
- pts-core: Better handling of missing tests
- pts-core: Faster reference system comparison support
- pts-core: Build reference system comparison cache when starting the GTK GUI
- pts-core: Add ReferenceSystems tag to user-config.xml for specifying extra reference system comparison IDs
- pts-core: Add width and height attributes to SVG graphs to show better in more web browsers with the PTS Results Viewer
- pts-core: New integrated network download engine
- pts-core: Add Timeout tag to the user-config.xml for adjusting the network read timeout
- pts-core: Launch a network support and proxy interface when launching the GTK GUI and no Internet is detected
- pts-core: Add debug-test-download-links option to find broken download links in test profiles
- phodevi: Support reading the system temperature through the hwmon sysfs interface
- phodevi: Fallback support to read the current monitor mode from xdpyinfo when available
- phodevi: Support for reading newer version numbers of the KDE Software Compilation desktop
- phodevi: Better CPU thermal monitoring
- phodevi: Faster / more efficient reading of sysfs nodes
- pts: Add unpack-linux test as a disk benchmark for timing how long it takes to extract the Linux kernel source
- pts: Drop filesystem test suite as its similar to the disk test suite, so move all the tests there
- pts: Add compilebench test profile for Oracle's Compile Bench
- pts: Update many out of date download links within test profiles