Phoronix Test Suite 9.8 Milestone 1 Readies Another Round Of Benchmarking Features

This week marks 16 years since starting Phoronix.com and 12 years since the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 release, so what better way to celebrate than a new development release of the Phoronix Test Suite.

Phoronix Test Suite 9.8-Nesodden is this new version under development and serving as the Q3'2020 feature release to our cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software for Linux / BSD / macOS / Solaris / Windows platforms. With Phoronix Test Suite 9.8 Milestone 1 available today as the first development release, highlights so far include:

- When a test install fails, the Phoronix Test Suite will now try (when available) a newer minor version of that particular test profile, with the minor version bumps most often being done to reflect download mirror / dependency changes and other minor changes without reflecting the workload under test, etc. This should improve the workflow particularly for those running OpenBenchmarking.org comparisons against older data sets where download mirrors may have changed or other minor tweaks needed to satisfy the test profile installation. For versions not having install issues, the behavior is unchanged, this is just about more intelligently dealing with cases of test install failures without changing the integrity of the benchmark.

- The Phoronix Test Suite virtual test suite implementation has been rewritten. Virtual test suites are what allow generating a test suite out of a given subsystem, external dependency, or other parseable form of data that is interesting for benchmarking. The new virtual test suite implementation makes use of more existing formal test suite class code as a nice internal code handling improvement.

- Code updates in preparations for formal PHP 8.0 support. At this point all deprecations and code changes should be fine for the current state of PHP 8.0 Git.

- A new phoronix-test-suite test-to-suite-map sub-command for showing for all tests what test suites they belong to.

- Continued refinements to the Phoronix Test Suite Result Viewer.

- Support for the new AMD Energy Linux driver to support reading the total CPU wattage for AMD Zen/Zen2 processors on Linux via the Phodevi system sensors interface for monitoring during benchmarking. The AMD Energy driver is new as of the yet-to-be-released Linux 5.8 kernel.

Those wanting to try this latest Phoronix Test Suite development release can be found via GitHub. Phoronix Test Suite 9.8 will be released as stable in July depending upon the outcome of the rest of the development efforts for this quarterly release.