Plans For Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand

As announced this morning on Twitter, the next major release of the Phoronix Test Suite is version 3.4 and it's codenamed Lillesand. Here's some initial details on this next version of our open-source benchmarking platform for Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows that is to be released in September.

Now that Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad has been released along with the 3.2.1 point release, it's time to start talking about Phoronix Test Suite 3.4 as the next major release. (As there aren't any serious bugs outstanding in the Phoronix Test Suite client, at this time I don't believe there will be a Phoronix Test Suite 3.2.2 release, unless any enterprise users can say otherwise.)

Phoronix Test Suite 3.4 is codenamed "Lillesand", which follows the themes of Phoronix Test Suite 3.x codenames being locations within Aust-Agder county, Norway. (This in turn follows the Phoronix Test Suite 2.x codenames being from Troms county and the Phoronix Test Suite 1.x codenames originating from Sør-Trøndelag, all in the great land of Norway.)

In terms of what Phoronix Test Suite 3.4 is slated to offer, this quarterly release will focus upon greater enhancements to OpenBenchmarking.org, new enterprise capabilities throughout, the new Phoromatic, pushing out OpenBenchmarking.org Live, and some other useful to-be-announced items.

The enterprise work deals with finishing up the long-in-development Phoromatic-over-OpenBenchmarking.org implementation, a new auto-bisecting module, and pulling in other functionality from the OpenBenchmarking.org platform. Most of this work is effectively done and just requires additional testing and small modifications. One of the items being worked on at the moment with this new code is the Intel per-commit driver benchmarking for Linux. As also mentioned on Twitter, around 4730 commits/revisions of Mesa shall be automatically tested over the next few days, in order to properly stress these new features.

There's also some ongoing work to improve the graphing component (pts_Graph) and the drawing library (bilde_renderer). A new user-interface also continues to be brewed.

Additionally, proper Google Android support and greater ARM testing capabilities is coming. The Qualcomm Innovation Center has graciously sent over a Snapdragon Mobile Development Platform MSM8655. The $1350 USD MSM865 boasts a dual-core 1.5GHz CPU, Android 2.3 pre-load, Adreno 220 GPU, 13-megapixel camera, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of flash memory. This mobile beauty should be arriving next week so that further ARM testing can commence.

If there's any other features or improvements you would like to see in the Phoronix Test Suite, please contact us or let us know in the forums or elsewhere. Professional support also continues to be available via PTS Commercial.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand will be released in Q3'2011, in particular around September. Due to the Chicago X.Org Developers' Conference that I am organizing and then Oktoberfest, Phoronix Test Suite 3.4 will likely be released the first week of September.