Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad Milestone 2

Only one week has passed sine the release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.2 Milestone 1, but there's some feature patches queued up now for release as 3.2-Grimstad Milestone 2 while waiting to catch a flight over to Munich.

Some of the key changes in this second test release include:

- The color allocator in bilde_renderer has been improved/fixed so that the colors between multiple bars and lines on graphs should be more distinct, etc.
- There's various improvements to the interactive text mode (accessible by running phoronix-test-suite interactive).
- There's now support for the Phoronix Test Suite to automatically un-install tests whenever they are no longer needed in the actively running test queue. This is useful for embedded environments as well as live environments where everything may be running from system memory. The downside, of course, is that each test must be installed then every-time prior to running it again. This feature is disabled by default but can be manipulated by the RemoveTestInstallOnCompletion XML option.
- Support for parsing the system/motherboard's serial number. This isn't used by default in the Phoronix Test Suite nor uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org, but is just provided for special enterprise cases where the serial number has been requested.
- If running a nested version of the Phoronix Test Suite within Wine, the host system's display server and driver should now be reported.
- Various other bug-fixes.

The latest release can be downloaded at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. The official release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad is due out in late May or early June.

For anyone wishing to talk about the Phoronix Test Suite, this weekend I'm in Munich, on Monday night is a Linux gathering in Nürnberg with several current and former SUSE developers and myself, and will then be in Frankfurt until Friday. Following that it's onto Budapest for the Ubuntu Developers' Summit before catching the tail end of LinuxTag back in Berlin. Catch me on Twitter for more details.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.2 Milestone 2
28 April 2011

- pts-core: Interactive mode improvements
- pts-core: Add TEST_RESULTS_DESCRIPTION environmental variable support
- pts-core: Add RemoveTestInstallOnCompletion to user-config.xml options
- bilde_renderer: Fix for assigning the same color from a color name-space cache multiple times
- phodevi: Add support for optionally reading motherboard/system serial number for Moscow
- phodevi: Use PHODEVI_SMART_CACHE on display server/driver