Benchmarking With 3.4-Lillesand Milestone 3

Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand Milestone 3 has been released this morning with some exciting enhancements to this open-source, automated testing platform.

Milestone 3 has quite a number of enhancements for Phoronix Test Suite 3.4, among which are:

- Improvements to HP webOS support and other ARM-based devices.

- Support for third-parties to upload custom test profiles and suites to OpenBenchmarking.org via the upload-test-profile and upload-test-suite commands.

- On new Phoronix Test Suite installations where a test hasn't previously been executed, pull the estimated run-time information based on statistics reported by other users to OpenBenchmarking.org.

- Improvements to non-SVG image formats.

- Phodevi hardware/software detection improvements.

- Support for toggling the GNOME 3.x screensaver automatically when running tests.

- A new system table type in pts_Graph.

- Support for drawing box plots via pts_Graph.

- The bilde_renderer PNG back-end should now render graphs/images closer to the SVG back-end.

- Various bug-fixes.

These changes are on top of other features of 3.4-Lillesand that were committed in earlier development releases. Lillesand Milestone 3 is just the culmination of two weeks worth of work. Some of the pts_Graph / bilde_renderer enhancements are also for allowing the OpenBenchmarking.org embedded graphs that will soon be in use by Phoronix.com, etc.

The formal release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.4 will likely take place next week as the 3.4-Lillesand code-base is in good shape right now, but if more features come in, the release might be pushed back by one week.

Download the latest release of this benchmarking software at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. Your feedback, as always, is appreciated.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.4 Milestone 3
31 August 2011

- pts-core: Support pts_compression library using the old ZIP API when ZipArchive is not present
- pts-core: Support calling external unzip command if ZIP / ZipArchive API calls fail
- pts-core: Add upload-test-profile command to upload user test profiles to their OpenBenchmarking.org account
- pts-core: Add upload-test-suite command to upload user test suites to their OpenBenchmarking.org account
- pts-core: When running a newer version of the Phoronix Test Suite then last time, update the OpenBenchmarking index cache
- pts-core: Add openbenchmarking-repositories command to list basic information about linked OpenBenchmarking.org repos
- pts-core: Support for reading the estimated run-time of test profiles from OpenBenchmarking.org repo indexes
- pts-core: Support more of the non-SVG graph types within the PTS Results Viewer
- pts-core: Report hardware/software information before running any test
- phodevi: Improve CPU core detection; fixes detection for some ARM devices like HP TouchPad
- phodevi: Improve disk storage detection for mobile devices
- phodevi: Use thermal_zone0 as system temperature if it's not claimed by anything else
- phodevi: Improve memory capacity detection
- toggle-screensaver: Support toggling the GNOME 3.x screensaver using GSettings
- bilde_renderer: Improve detection of web browsers that support SVG and those that need to fall back to PNG
- bilde_renderer: Rewrite the fake ->draw_dashed_line() function to be more efficient and accurate
- bilde_renderer: Improve the PNG back-end to render more closely to SVG back-end
- pts_Graph: Add new system table to use on featured comparisons
- pts_Graph: Introduce new horizontal box plot graph for line graphs where there's too many lines