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  • AMD Open-Sources Tapper

    Phoronix: AMD Open-Sources Tapper

    AMD has announced today they have open-sourced Tapper from their Operating System Research Center...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Sorry, OT

    You know... you really don't run an SQLite database server...

    Comment


    • #3
      Why not acknowledge Phoronix?

      I guess it would be nice for the AMD folks to acknowledge the PTS in their information page for Tapper.

      And, of course, thanks AMD for contributing back ...

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by mendieta View Post
        I guess it would be nice for the AMD folks to acknowledge the PTS in their information page for Tapper.

        And, of course, thanks AMD for contributing back ...
        They aren't contributing back, this is their own incarnation of a test infrastructure from their OSRC. Doesn't make too much sense to me, but oh well.
        Michael Larabel
        https://www.michaellarabel.com/

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Michael View Post
          They aren't contributing back, this is their own incarnation of a test infrastructure from their OSRC. Doesn't make too much sense to me, but oh well.
          Yeah you are right, contributing back would mean pushing some improvements back to Phoronix. Releasing their code is a first step, and I was referring to that, but they could become a downstream product, keep in sync, and work with you. That would be the best approach IMHO. Not only it would benefit Phoronix, it would benefit AMD, because they's inherit all your improvements all the time. This is he beauty of Open Source

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          • #6
            Originally posted by mendieta View Post
            Yeah you are right, contributing back would mean pushing some improvements back to Phoronix. Releasing their code is a first step, and I was referring to that, but they could become a downstream product, keep in sync, and work with you. That would be the best approach IMHO. Not only it would benefit Phoronix, it would benefit AMD, because they's inherit all your improvements all the time. This is he beauty of Open Source
            Unless I misread something, Tapper is not in any way based on PTS... it's a completely separate project created by AMD.

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            • #7
              I would imagine AMD had a different use-case in mind for Tapper when they started the project.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by bhassel View Post
                Unless I misread something, Tapper is not in any way based on PTS... it's a completely separate project created by AMD.
                its the way its written in the article that is confusing.

                What is Tapper? It's basically their version of the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic.
                If it was written like:

                What is Tapper? It's basically a benchmarking suite, created by AMD, similar to the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic.
                it wouldn't have caused any misunderstandings.

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                • #9
                  Some more clarification

                  Hi!

                  Some comments to help understanding what Tapper really is:

                  Tapper is exactly not yet another test or benchmark suite. It is a
                  test infrastructure which among other things allows to write or
                  embed test suites.

                  In that the focus is much larger, much more targeting an enterprise QA
                  life cycle than just being a test suite.

                  Tapper allows gluing together components based on existing
                  standards. One central idea for that is the standard Test Anything
                  Protocol (http://testanything.org) which allows language agnostic
                  generation of test results.

                  In order to run a Tapper client it is not neccessary to have a
                  Tapper server. You can run a TAP emitting testsuite with the standard
                  command "prove" that comes with every Linux system, like

                  Code:
                   prove ./tap-emitting-testsuite.sh
                  Only when you want to store your results into the history database you
                  need a server. And then it's nothing more than just

                  Code:
                   ./tap-emitting-testsuite.sh | netcat $tapperserver $port
                  An important focus left out in the post is the advanced result evaluation.
                  Please see this presentation
                  to understand how any complex results, that are even allowed to
                  structurally change over time, can be tracked and evaluated.

                  It provides a query language that combines a database independent SQL
                  abstraction and a variant of XPath all in one concise API without the
                  need of client side dependencies. The point of that is to allow
                  test result forensics in ways you don't know in advance.

                  The opensourced version already ships with a wrapper for the autotest
                  client - that immediately provides you access to about 90(!) test
                  suites. For that the OSRC contributed TAP support to the autotest
                  project. See
                  autotest mailing list for details.

                  And Tapper is actually used with a Phoronix test suite wrapper at the
                  OSRC. For phoronix it would be most practical to be embedded into
                  autotest to be useful to more test communities. The Tapper-TestSuite-AutoTest
                  would then just pick it up automatically.

                  Tapper only implements features that were not available in 2008 when
                  they were needed, like virtualization setups for stress testing
                  (inclusive windows test suites in the guests), or when available
                  solutions were not enough, like the scheduler.

                  The automation layer provides a built-in installer to set up
                  virtualization scenarios but others can be plugged in easily. That is
                  actually done for kickstart/autoyast based setups and for simnow
                  testing.

                  On top of that the scheduler allows multiplexing machine pools with
                  any freely definable use-cases. It is built to schedule "too many
                  use-cases" on "not enough machines" based on bandwidths.

                  Setting up a Tapper instance for tracking test results is easy as all
                  dependencies are resolved by standard CPAN installation. The
                  non-trivial setup of an automation infrastructure with virtualization
                  support is additionally supported with the Tapper-Starterkit.

                  To complete a QA life cycle Tapper can schedule dedicated testplans
                  that belong to tasks defined by a planning software like
                  TaskJuggler. The results are reported back to TaskJuggler and
                  therefore covered in the project status pages.

                  The layers are strongly decoupled and all interfaces are very
                  lightweight, to allow glueing more things together in the future.

                  I hope I could clarify on some points.

                  Kind regards,
                  Steffen

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