Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" Alpha 3

Two weeks have passed since the release of Iveland Alpha 2, but now it's time for the third alpha release for the Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" benchmarking platform. Quite a number of changes have built up over such a short period of time as this release nears OpenBenchmarking.org integration and ready for its planned release in Q1'2011.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Alpha 3 brings a number of bug-fixes, a few updates to the result file specification overhaul that occurred in the previous alpha, new user configuration options, a number of XML Schemas (XSD) that when stable will be ratified as the OpenBenchmarking.org Test Specifications, some minor alterations to the test profile specification, and plenty of other pts-core alterations.

Outside of the internal changes, this release has better support for OpenIndiana b147 and Oracle Solaris 11 Express benchmarking, Mac OS X benchmark improvements, HTTPS connection support for Phoromatic, ARM Linux benchmarking improvements, and support for NVIDIA GPU core usage monitoring via NVIDIA's latest SMI implementation.

When it comes to the Phoronix Test Suite test profiles, a number of them have been updated against their latest upstream versions: Apache, MPLayer, 7-Zip, FFmpeg, GraphicsMagick, PostgreSQL, SQLite, x264, and RAMspeed. THe CLOMP OpenMP-based benchmark from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a test to measure multi-core efficiency is also a new test profile introduced in this release. Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Alpha 3 also has better support of 100+ test profiles under Solaris, BSD, and Mac OS X operating systems.

With Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Alpha 3, this is also very likely to be the last release that will have the test profiles and test suites integrated into the Phoronix Test Suite client itself. In the next few days these test profiles will no longer be bound to a particular Phoronix Test Suite release and completely out of its releases/Git code-base, but will move into OpenBenchmarking.org and its cloud package management system, codenamed Frigg.

There should be at least two more alpha releases of Iveland before reaching beta, based upon how the OpenBenchmarking.org integration and development progresses this month. The Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org are still scheduled for introduced in the first quarter of 2011. For more on what else is going on with Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland", see the aforementioned links as well as the other Iveland articles.

Download it and benchmark away!

Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Alpha 3
2 December 2010

- pts-core: Fix test suites failing to run where it'd get caught in an infinite loop
- pts-core: Fix for suite support on Iveland
- pts-core: Add ReferenceID tag to result-file specification
- pts-core: Support for remote download caches on test installation without relying upon pts-install.xml index
- pts-core: Add SaveTestLogs to user-config.xml for now toggling whether to save the test logs
- pts-core: Add an XML Schema XSD covering the result-file
- pts-core: Add an XML Schema XSD covering the test-suite
- pts-core: Add an XML Schema XSD covering the test-profile-downloads
- pts-core: Add an XML Schema XSD covering the results-parser
- pts-core: Add an XML Schema XSD covering the test-profile
- pts-core: On client program startup, report any missing PHP extensions that are required or recommended
- pts-core: TEST PROFILE XML SPEC CHANGE: TestInformation/Version -> TestInformation/AppVersion
- pts-core: TEST PROFILE/SUITE XML SPEC CHANGE: Split RequiresCoreVersion tag into RequiresCoreVersionMin and RequiresCoreVersionMax
- pts-core: Add InternalTags to XML test profile schema
- pts-core: Drop support for ~/pts-test-note as the capabilities are now found within InternalTags using a cleaner method
- pts-core: Better the support for Illumos OpenIndiana b147
- pts-core: Support still saving test results when using the system_monitor module even when all tests being run are of NO_RESULT type
- phodevi: Few Mac OS X support improvements
- phodevi: Support NVIDIA GPU core usage monitoring via nvidia-smi
- phoromatic: HTTPS connection support, install the Phoromatic.com SSL certificate
- pts: Update apache test profile against upstream Apache 2.2.17
- pts: Update build-apache test profile against upstream Apache 2.2.17
- pts: Update build-mplayer test profile against upstream MPlayer 1.0rc3
- pts: Update compress-7zip test profile against upstream p7zip 9.13
- pts: Update ffmpeg test profile against upstream FFmpeg 0.6.1
- pts: Update graphics-magick test profile against GraphicsMagick 1.3.12
- pts: Update pgbench test profile against PostgreSQL 9.0.1
- pts: Update sqlite test profile against SQLite 3.7.3
- pts: Update x264 test profile against upstream x264 2010-11-22
- pts: Update ramspeed test profile against RAMspeed SMP (RAMSMP) 3.5.0
- pts: Add the CLOMP OpenMP LLNL benchmark
- pts: First pass at validating all test profiles
- pts: Verify each upstream test profile's compatibility on Solaris, BSD, and MacOSX