Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Release Candidate Arrives

With less than two weeks to go until Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" makes its official debut with OpenBenchmarking.org at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), it's time for a release candidate. Hitting the Internet this Monday is the first release candidate of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 with even more improvements.

Since the release of the fourth 3.0-Iveland beta at the beginning of February, many more improvements and fixes were merged. Some of the items worth noting are listed below.

- Various bug-fixes for multi-way comparisons, the build-suite command now works again, BIOS version detection, support for detecting Ubuntu's Unity desktop, and more efficient rendering of graphs.

- On the module front, there's updates to the system_monitor module for sensor polling and a new result external notification module.

- There's more enhancements and integration for OpenBenchmarking.org, but it's not worth going into any further detail on that until this open, automated testing platform is publicly available.

- The bilde_renderer drawing library now supports handling HSL color formats as an alternative to RGB / HTML hex formats, color shading, gradients, and color rotation support. These bilde_renderer improvements were made so that in this release pts_Graph, the graphing component of the Phoronix Test Suite, could receive support for creating heat-map graphs as part of this OpenBenchmarking.org feature and to also introduce support for scatter plots, as part of this OpenBenchmarking.org work.

- Last but not least, the Phoronix Test Suite is set to receive better support for running under Wine. As was found out on the Phoronix Test Suite mailing list a few days ago, Stefan Dösinger, one of the CrossOver developers at CodeWeavers, is working on bringing up a Wine performance testing infrastructure atop the Phoronix Test Suite / Phoromatic / OpenBenchmarking.org, including some new test profiles. With Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Release Candidate 1, there is now proper support for running the Phoronix Test Suite when nestled within the Wine environment, but this is just the start of ongoing work.

Download the 3.0 Release Candidate 1 at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com and be sure to upload your results to OpenBenchmarking.org. Based upon the feedback, a second release candidate may come prior to the official release at month's end. For those not yet up to speed on Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org, read the Phoronix Iveland articles and posts and be sure to attend the Southern California Linux Expo talk if you will be in Los Angeles the next weekend.