3.0-Iveland Gets Bullish On OpenBenchmarking.org

Now available is Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" Alpha 4 and it is one exciting release. As said last week in Bye-Bye Test Profiles & Suites; Hi OpenBenchmarking.org, this release strips out the test profiles and test suites from the Phoronix Test Suite client and moves it into the OpenBenchmarking.org cloud. With initial integration for OpenBenchmarking.org in place for the Phoronix Test Suite, things are now on the verge of becoming a lot more interesting.

As I said before about this new online infrastructure that redefines our open and collaborative testing platform for results sharing and management, "I expect OpenBenchmarking.org to eventually become bigger -- both in terms of traffic and even greater industry importance -- than Phoronix.com itself." This continues to be the belief and even more so these days with the OpenBenchmarking.org features materializing as expected and new, extremely exciting features continuing to be conceived. Whether you're a free software project looking to crowd-source and provide greater collaboration over your testing process or are just an individual or organization looking for Linux hardware choices for your next upgrade, OpenBenchmarking.org will provide an arsenal of features at your disposal. Heck, if you are searching for Linux hardware information, once OpenBenchmarking.org is launched I will recommend first going there before even hitting up the Phoronix.com home-page to look for Linux benchmarks and other compatibility information.

Anyways, the OpenBenchmarking.org integration that's now publicly available with Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Alpha 4 is the automatic management of new test profiles/suites (for those without an Internet connection or running this on an Internet-less enterprise test farm environment, offline integration is coming in another later development release) and support for uploading results to OpenBenchmarking.org. OpenBenchmarking.org supersedes Phoronix Global.

There isn't yet support for user registration and such, but if you are an individual testing out a Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 release from now on, please do upload your results to OpenBenchmarking.org to help us grow this database. Once launched, you'll see why it will all be very worthwhile to everyone. Additional OpenBenchmarking.org features and fine-tuned integration will continue to come from here on out with each succeeding Iveland development release.

Besides moving out the test profiles/suites and pushing in the first bits of OpenBenchmarking.org, there's also some other changes to be found in Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Alpha 4. First of all, the new Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 documentation has been started. This new documentation is much more extensive than found in Phoronix Test Suite 1.x/2.x and is also in PDF format and the manual (man) page is much more complete too since it's generated from the same documentation pool. The documentation isn't yet complete (or even near complete), but you can find it within the documentation folder of Iveland Alpha 4.

This fourth alpha milestone also brings back support for virtual test suites, which is also integrated with the OpenBenchmarking.org repositories. Read the new PDF documentation to see how virtual test suites work as a new, just-as-easy alternative to traditional test suites.

This release also carries improvements to Phodevi (the Phoronix Device Interface) library for a few hardware/software detection improvements, new phoronix-test-suite commands, and lots of other changes.

With Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Alpha 4, we're now past 50% of the way there for the major code-level work for this release due out next quarter. Soon it should be nearly feature-complete and in the next development release or two I would recommend the vendors using the Phoronix Test Suite to begin trying it out to make sure it meets their needs and newest feature requests. In fact, most of the work left to accomplish prior to launch is on OpenBenchmarking.org itself.

There will likely be one more alpha release before year's end and then it will be time for the betas. At this point I will also mention that the official Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" and OpenBenchmarking.org launch will either be at the Southern California Linux Expo (waiting to hear back on the talks by Matthew Tippett and I) or a week later at CeBit in Hannover, Germany.

The latest release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 can be downloaded at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. When trying it out, assuming you aren't running any unreleased software/hardware, do try to upload the results to OpenBenchmarking.org.

As always, we do welcome your feedback or let us know in the forums.