PTS3 Iveland Development Update

For those interested in the development activity of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland", here's an update as to the progress with a few notes.

- I'm nearing the end of the first stage of Iveland's development. Most of the underlying pts-core changes needed to support the intended features of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 (and a few plans for later on in the PTS3 cycle) are now in place. As of right now this is about a 20,200 line patch compared to Phoronix Test Suite 2.8.1. This should settle within a week or two and then I'll likely tag the first PTS 3.0 Alpha build (mid-November) before moving onto the second stage, which will be the start of the work on OpenBenchmarking.org integration.

- With few exceptions, every supported Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 feature from PTS2 should now be at the same level of support as found with PTS 2.8.1 [as many options/commands required slight modifications along the way to make them compatible with Iveland's pts-core changes], but better in many cases with a few options receiving bug-fixes and other minor enhancements. The exception to this, however, is the GTK2 GUI.

- With the GTK2 GUI, unless I happen to be ahead of schedule with everything else, Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 will likely ship without the GTK2 GUI. As the GUI happens to touch many parts of pts-core that are changing with Iveland, most of the mid-level GUI code needs to be updated as there are many internal API breaks. So unless I happen to find a lot of extra time prior to the Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 release, the GUI will not return until Phoronix Test Suite 3.2. However, seeing as most professional users utilize the command-line interface or take advantage of the Phoromatic web-interface, this shouldn't be much of a problem. When it comes to making the GUI PTS3-compatible, it will also be evaluated whether to rewrite the interface in another tool-kit or the best approach to utilize since many have been having problems setting up PHP-GTK and upstream the project seems to be about dead.

- The final release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" is still targeted for release in Q1'2011. A Phoronix Test Suite 2.8.2 release will still likely be released this quarter that just carries a couple fixes worthy of back-porting to Torsken.

- By default on new installations, even if the PHP-GD library is installed, pts_Graph / bilde_renderer will default to using the SVG back-end for rendering of graphs rather than PNG. SVG will really be the focus going forward to provide feature-rich graphs compatible with as many browsers and platforms as possible. If you want to, however, use the PNG/JPG/SWF renderers, you can continue to do so by modifying the Renderer tag within ~/.phoronix-test-suite/graph-config.xml. There's also some other options added to graph-config.xml as well for switching between horizontal and vertical bar graphs and then the usual options for changing a graph's color scheme, etc.

- While most of the Iveland Alpha 1 work is all internal changes, there are a few user-visible changes such as with the new graphing capabilities (see RFC: A Preview Of The Phoronix Graphs With Iveland) and then shortly the OpenBenchmarking.org integration (see How Linux Benchmarking Will Change With Iveland & OpenBenchmarking.org). There's also smarter, more reliable external dependency management.

- With the first alpha release (and potentially the second alpha release too) the test profiles and suites are continuing to live within the phoronix-test-suite package but will be pulled out around December when the OpenBenchmarking.org integration is complete.

I'll have a more formal update on Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 with some of the other planned features shortly. I'll also be back in San Diego, California from 4 November to 9 November if there are any other individuals, companies, or universities interested in learning more about the Phoronix Test Suite or anything else, just contact me.

Michael Larabel

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