Phoronix Test Suite 4.6-Utsira Milestone 1 Released

The first development release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.6 (codenamed "Utsira") is now available for open-source, cross-platform, automated benchmarking and testing.

Succeeding Phoronix Test Suite 4.4-Forsand from the first quarter is going to be Phoronix Test Suite 4.6-Utsira this quarter. This will be another major feature release to the Phoronix Test Suite open-source automated testing / benchmarking software and framework.

Key features for the newly released Phoronix Test Suite 4.6 Milestone 1 include:

- Official support for Facebook's HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM). The Phoronix Test Suite has previously supported the HipHop HHPC implementation and now the HHVM implementation is officially supported. Up to now, HHVM has worked with the Phoronix Test Suite, but with version 4.6, the hhvm binary will be automatically detected when php is not present. Additionally, there were some changes to non-critical code-paths for providing greater compatibility with HHVM's current PHP language implementation. Phoronix Test Suite 4.6 Milestone 1 has been tested against HHVM 2.0.1 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. For more details on HHVM, read Facebook's HipHop 2.0 Virtual Machine Is Very Fast.

- The debug-self-test command has been pushed into the public repository of the Phoronix Test Suite. The phoronix-test-suite debug-self-test command is used for checking new PHP versions/implementations, a micro-benchmark of some common "hot paths" for the Phoronix Test Suite in optimizing its performance (e.g. SVG graph rendering and XML parsing), and other development use-cases.

- A change for handling sudo on Ubuntu 13.04.

- An phoronix-test-suite internal-run command. This is effectively a pre-seeded Phoronix Test Suite batch benchmarking configuration. Rather than needing to run phoronix-test-suite batch-setup and then phoronix-test-suite batch-run, this runs the benchmark mode in a common pre-seeded use-case of running the Phoronix Test Suite in a semi-automated manner (still being prompted for the result file names, descriptions, etc), but without uploading the result data to the public OpenBenchmarking.org server. You can still configure the batch mode manually, but this internal-run option is just a quick method for one of the most common batch configurations of semi-automated, private testing.

- A fix for system memory DIMM detection on modern releases of Apple OS X. There's also a change to improve detecting the latest release of Apple's Xcode.

- Support for detecting Intel GPU overclocking under Linux.

- Various other minor enhancements and bug-fixes.

Expect more features to land in upcoming development releases prior to the official Phoronix Test Suite 4.6-Utsira debut in late May or June. As with the other Phoronix Test Suite 4.x releases and building upon the long-standing naming theme, the Phoronix Test Suite 4.6 codename is derived from a location in Rogaland.

The latest Phoronix Test Suite release is available at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. Contact us for professional support, custom engineering engagements, and other enterprise support matters.