One of the most common areas of feedback on Phoronix and also by those using the Phoronix Test Suite has been over the graphs that show our test / benchmark results. They're simple yet effective, however, as of late more parties have become interested in having these graphs display greater detail about the test results and other information. Fortunately, one of the major areas already being planned for Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 (to be introduced by the end of 2010) is a totally overhauled graphing interface.

For Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 (codenamed "Lyngen") we have back-ported some of the graphing improvements into the current code-base. This involves modifications to pts_Graph, the Phoronix Test Suite graphing component, and bilde_renderer, our abstracted drawing and rendering API that allows seamlessly targeting JPG/PNG/GIF/SVG/SWF back-ends. With Lyngen and future releases, bilde_renderer is being extended to offer interactivity and animation support that will be then hooked in by the supported back-ends (particularly SVG and Flash/SWF formats).

The first bits of support for these graphing changes have been pushed to the public Phoromatic.com server and will soon to be available from Phorogit. With these changes being pushed to Phoromatic, those using our remote test management system can immediately start benefiting from this with the SVG graphs -- and from the Phoromatic Kernel Tracker too.

While this is just the first, small step, if you head on over to kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com and are looking at any of our daily kernel benchmarks from past or present, simply hover over any of the bars. A title tool-tip should display (depending upon the level of SVG support within your web browser) and it will display the values along with the standard deviation between test runs. From here you can start to get a better idea for any deviation between the test runs that day for tests where the Phoronix Test Suite is executing a test multiple times. Also, if you click on a graph's title whether you be on Phoromatic or within the PTS Results Viewer, you should be taken over to the page for that test on Phoronix Global.

Again, this is just the start of many more features that will be exposed in graphs generated by the Phoronix Test Suite over the coming releases to provide greater functionality and beauty. As time progresses, these graphs will also find their way on Phoronix.com. Enjoy and stay tuned to hear about many more Phoronix Test Suite advancements.