Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 "Torsken" Goes To Alpha

After you're done reading about how Btrfs support within the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic is going to make bisecting bugs / regressions go very fast, you may want to stop by Phoronix-Test-Suite.com as the first alpha release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 "Torsken" is now available.

Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 is the last major release prior to Phoronix Test Suite 3.0, which will introduce the aforementioned snapshot-bisecting capabilities among other major advancements. Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Alpha 1 doesn't bring too many exciting end-user changes in this release unlike previous Alpha 1 releases as most of the work going on is taking place within the pts-core engine in preparation for the many PTS3 improvements, but there still are some items worth talking about.

Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Alpha 1 now natively supports generating a pie chart result type (in addition to its bar graphs, line graphs, candle stick charts, pass-fail graphs, and image quality comparison types) that will be utilized modestly in the future, new test safeguards, further refinements to the new PTS Results Viewer interface, the mandating of the new pts-results XML parsing interface of test results, various bug-fixes, a few minor features at the request of some of the corporate users, and the dropping of some old test profiles.

Below is the official change-log for Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Alpha 1, but most of the work that went into the code since the release of 2.6 "Lyngen" last month has been the pts-core preparations for PTS3. The final release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 is expected by late August.

Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Alpha 1
June 30, 2010

- pts-core: Start work on pts_PieChart for generating pie charts
- pts-core: When installing/running a test, make sure the TEST_ENV_DIR is writable
- pts-core: Add MultiMatch support to the parse-results.xml interface
- pts-core: Don't add empty tests to the test execution queue
- pts-core: Don't delete old test results when running a saved test result identifier and it fails
- pts-core: Don't report test profiles with a NO_RESULT ResultFormat as having failed to run
- pts-core: Drop support for parse-results.php/parse-results.sh, now mandate the parse-results.xml interface as its superior
- pts-core: Add FORCE_MIN_TIMES_TO_RUN environmental variable support
- pts-core: Attempt to better determine inverted multi-way comparisons
- pts-core: Validate test installations to run prior to save prompt
- pts-core: Further tweaking of the PTS Results Viewer
- pts-core: Drop analyze-linear-tracker command as we now auto-determine whether the result file is a tracker-type test
- pts-core: Ensure unique color indexes where possible on rendered graph keys
- pts-core: Lots of internal code changes for PTS3 plans
- phodevi: When LLVMpipe is being used, support modes below 800 x 600
- pts: Drop fgl-glxgears, fract, md-gromacs, memory-bandwidth, super-pi test profiles
- pts: Update mplayer-base with newer MPlayer snapshot and add VA-API support
- pts: Update video-cpu-usage test profile to use Big Buck Bunny 1080p H.264 sample