Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 Released With More Features For Open-Source, Cross-Platform Automated Benchmarking

Phoronix Test Suite 9.4-Vestby is now available as one of our largest updates in recent years for our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking framework. Almost wanting to rebrand it as Phoronix Test Suite 10, sticking to conventional versioning the Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 release brings numerous result viewer improvements, a lot of polishing to the PDF result exporting, various Microsoft Windows support improvements, new statistics capabilities, some useful new sub-commands, and much more as the latest quarterly feature release.

The Phoronix Test Suite result viewer that was overhauled in Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 has continued receiving more feature work. There are a number of new options exposed for analyzing test results and presenting the information in different manners, support for viewing test installation logs and result run logs directly within the result viewer, support for deleting individual results or entire result files from the viewer (the delete support can be toggled via the user configuration file), and a lot of other small improvements.

Among the new options are compacting multi-option tests into single graph displays and similarly if running multiple versions of a single test profile to compact the results from multiple versions of the test(s) into a multi-way version comparison graph.

The Phoronix Test Suite result viewer now also allows annotating/commenting on individual benchmark results. Those annotations are archived as part of the result file schema and presented on subsequent loads or also embedded below graphs when exporting the results to PDF. This is useful for those wanting to include their analysis of the results within the result file itself for presenting as a convenient PDF or when archiving the actual results.

The PTS 9.0+ result viewer is also now enabled by default on Microsoft Windows. Previous releases were falling back to the older static result viewer on Windows while now the support is in good shape for Windows handling.

Also seeing many improvements with Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 is the result file exporting to PDF either from the phoronix-test-suite result-file-to-pdf command or when selecting the PDF export option from the result viewer. PDF bookmarks are now generated for easily finding results within the PDF, there is an "automated executive summary" at the start of the PDF that provides some automated analysis of the results, various graphing improvements within the PDF and to help allow more graphs per page, and other subtle usability improvements.

Shown within the PDF results in one of the areas, Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 now allows showing the performance-per-suite for result files with a large number of benchmark results with different tests being run. For example, based upon the test suites (a collection of test profiles) like Java, C/C++ compiler benchmarks, renderers, audio/video encoding, and more, based upon auto-analyzing the relationship of those test profiles to the different test suites, geometric mean results are generated not only for the entire set of results but also for these grouped logical areas for offering additional insight as to the performance in these defined areas.

With pts_Graph, the Phoronix Test Suite graphing code has also received some refinements to modernize the appearance.

Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 also brings improvements on reporting of test installation errors/failures, including the ability to use the external dependency solver on supported platforms for reporting the package names on missing libraries reported by the linker.

One of the new sub-commands with the 9.4 release are phoronix-test-suite remove-result-from-result-file as a new CLI means of deleting individual tests within result files compared to the previous search-based remove-results-from-result-file. Also helpful is the new phoronix-test-suite intersect sub-command. This intersect option allows for passing two or more test suites and shown will be all test profiles common to all those suites. For example, running phoronix-test-suite pts/windows pts/linux would show all tests supported on both Linux and Windows. Or phoronix-test-suite intersect pts/linux pts/renderers would show all rendering benchmarks supported on Linux, among other possibilities.

On the Phodevi (Phoronix Device Interface) hardware/software abstraction layer side for device reporting is better support for persistent memory devices, support for reporting drive temperatures via the drivetemp kernel module on Linux 5.6+ (reports via HWMON for no longer needing root and other improvements over existing drive temperature reporting means), and other software/hardware detection improvements.

All in all there are a lot of improvements to Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 and a lot of smaller items addressed, but it's particularly big on the result viewer front and for PDF result viewing. Phoronix Test Suite 9.4 is available from GitHub and Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.