Hitting The First Milestone For 3.2-Grimstad

The first milestone release of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad release has been achieved. This first test release is now available for facilitating your automated benchmarks and testing infrastructure under Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BSD platforms whether it be a server, desktop, or mobile device.

This development release is coming almost two months after the official launch of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" and the launch of OpenBenchmarking.org and about one month since the 3.0.1 point release. Phoronix Test Suite 3.2 is officially set to be debut in Q2'2011 (late May or early June).

Unlike past development cycles, the development releases are being tagged as "milestone" releases rather than an alpha or beta. 3.2 Milestone 1 can be considered a beta type release but should be quite stable for carrying out any early tests and helping to work out any bugs before the official 3.2 release. It's already being used in some tests by one of our enterprise clients, but there will be at least two or three more milestone releases before the official 3.2-Grimstad release is tagged.

What's new in our GPLv3-licensed testing software? Some of the work so far in the Grimstad cycle includes:

Wine testing improvements. Thanks to CodeWeavers stepping up to the plate to work on some per-commit Wine testing and contributing some more Windows game test profiles, 3.2-Grimstad has improved support for running nested within a Wine environment on Linux and Mac OS X. Plus there's more improvements on our end coming quite soon.

Compiling under Facebook's HipHop. The Phoronix Test Suite can now be translated to C++ and compiled as a native Linux binary using Facebook's HipHop technology. However, it's not quite running properly yet, but later on in the Grimstad cycle, all of the changes should be in place. This should hopefully allow the Phoronix Test Suite to run on some new hardware platforms where PHP may not be readily available.

Text-driven interaction. Thanks to an enterprise support, there's now the start of an interactive text-driven mode to the Phoronix Test Suite. Run phoronix-test-suite interactive for this simple CLI interface. More in this area is coming soon as well.

OpenBenchmarking.org enhancements. There's a variety of underlying OpenBenchmarking.org integration improvements in this release as well. There's also the start of the "Ekofisk" support, which is bringing up a next-generation Phoromatic implementation atop the OpenBenchmarking.org platform. Again, expect more announcements soon.

Hardware and software improvements. This PTS 3.2-Grimstad M1 release carries improved support for Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion", Nouveau thermal sensor detection enhancements, and support for the AMD k10temp hardware sensor monitoring module, among other improvements to Phodevi.

There's also a variety of other improvements in this early Phoronix Test Suite 3.2 release that aren't yet documented.

Head on over to Phoronix-Test-Suite.com to try out the latest 3.2-Grimstad development release or the stable Phoronix Test Suite 3.0.1. Also be sure to upload your results to OpenBenchmarking.org (improvements here are also forthcoming and on my TODO list).