Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 Gains A Few More Features

While Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 "Sokndal" was anticipated for release this week, an uptick in last minute work led to an additional development milestone release. While the new Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.0 release is now expected next week, there's some exciting late features for those into open-source benchmarking and performance testing.

For the "Sokndal" release there's now five development milestone builds. New features have been added like OpenGL frame latency / jitter testing, min/max frame-rate reporting, more advanced GPU identification, and other features. Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 Milestone 5 that's available today adds in some more changes.

- User-set kernel module parameters are reported to the system table graph, which is growing more useful in the time of the non-default Radeon DPM (Dynamic Power Management) testing, Nouveau re-clocking, and other changes that require custom kernel command-line parameters.

- Support for reporting "important" environment variables. Based upon installed hardware/software, different environment variables (if set) will be reported like forced custom Mesa/Gallium3D parameters and DRI_PRIME, etc.

- To the pts_Graph component for producing result graphs there is a slightly modified color selection pattern in use. You can see recent Phoronix articles for example of the new color selection in use. More feedback on automated color selection is welcome.

- Various changes for finally bringing Phoromatic up to speed and compatibility with Phoronix Test Suite 4.x!

- The Phoronix Device Interface (Phodevi) library has added support for new kernel debugfs/sysfs values on the very latest Linux kernel releases like Intel's gt_max_freq_mhz/gt_cur_freq_mhz.

- Canonical's unity-system-compositor is automatically detected when in use and reported to the display server system information string along with the recorded unity-system-compositor version.

- Various other bug-fixes and minor tweaks.

I welcome anyone to try out the latest Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 Milestone 5 release and it should be in shape for an official release within the next week or so. After that, exciting developments will be announced for Phoronix Test Suite 5.0 "Plavsk" with the new HTML5 UI, the restoring of the Phoronix Test Suite Live DVD/USB benchmarking environment, and a whole lot more.

Download the latest Phoronix Test Suite release at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.

Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 Milestone 5
06 August 2013

- pts-core: Add php5-json as a dependency now on Debian packages since Ubuntu split it up and no longer in php5-cli
- pts-core: Add support for reporting set kernel module parameters to notes on the system table graph
- pts-core: Add support for reporting of important environment variables to notes on the system table graph
- pts-core: Changes needed for modern Phoromatic
- pts_Graph: Add new automated color chooser for line graph color selection
- pts_Graph: Slight rework to code handling the remove of common words from result identifiers
- phodevi: Add support for Intel DRM driver's gt_max_freq_mhz for obtaining maximum GPU frequency on modern kernels
- phodevi: Add support for Intel DRM driver's gt_cur_freq_mhz for obtaining current GPU frequency on modern kernels
- phodevi: Only prepend AIB vendor to NVIDIA and AMD GPU strings
- phodevi: Add system.kernel-parameters property for reading kernel command line parameters
- phodevi: Add support for checking the __GL_FSAA_MODE environment variable
- phodevi: Add support for checking the __GL_LOG_MAX_ANISO environment variable
- phodevi: Add 0xc36400 super block for CephFS
- phodevi: Add unity-system-compositor version detection