Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.4 Has Testing, Wayland Improvements

I'm happy to announced the release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.4 this afternoon. This latest stable release of our leading cross-platform open-source benchmarking software has improvements for better dealing with Wayland environments, new test profile capabilities, and other hardware/software reporting improvements.

As there's a lot of work going into Phoronix Test Suite 5.0 with a brand new graphical user-interface and a ton of other features yet to be revealed, the official release isn't likely to come until Q1'2014 -- rather than abiding by our usual quarterly release strategy with 4.8.0 having come in Q3'2013. However, to make up for this quarter, I'm continuing with stable point release updates that bring safe yet important changes.

Among the changes found in Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.4, to replace v4.8.3 from one month ago, include:

- Better dealing with Wayland environments outside of an X.Org Server (e.g. still offering to show a web browser with results when WAYLAND_DISPLAY is set but not the DISPLAY environment variable) and detecting of the Weston compositor version. There's also detection for the GNOME Shell running on Wayland.

- Numerous external dependency improvements and additions. SuiteSparse, TinyXML, and DUNE are among the new external dependencies that are optional for forthcoming new Phoronix Test Suite benchmarks.

- New ResultScale, ResultProportion, and ResultPrecision XML tags for the test profile result parser. These new test profile capabilities are used for some new scientific benchmarks, to be covered on Phoronix later today or tomorrow.

- A new capability for test profiles to be able to optionally report custom data via footnotes on test result graphics in a standardized and uniform manner.

- OpenBenchmarking.org integration improvements.

- Various software and hardware detection/reporting improvements via the Phodevi (Phoronix Device Interface) library.

Overall it's a very good release and all Phoronix Test Suite users on Linux, BSD, OS X, and Solaris operating systems are encouraged to upgrade. Stay tuned for more Phoronix Test Suite 5.0 details in the weeks ahead.

The latest release of our open-source benchmarking platform/framework can be downloaded via Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. Commercial support continues to be offered with new test development, custom engineering services, Phoromatic licensing, and other support options.