Phoronix Test Suite 7.8 M2 Released As "Folldal" Development Heats Up

Just one week after Phoronix Test Suite 7.8 Milestone 1, the second development release of 7.8-Folldal is now available for testing.

Phoronix Test Suite 7.8 M2 is heavier on the end-user facing changes as this quarterly development cycle heats up and also initial planning underway for Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 that in turn will ship this summer.

There are many notable changes to Phoronix Test Suite 7.8 Milestone 2 and among them are:

- Phoromatic Servers can now easily serve any test profiles to Phoronix Test Suite clients. This includes custom tests or any other third-party test repositories that may just be enabled on the Phoromatic Server. This has been one of the recurring questions by Phoromatic users is if having an internal test case they wish to keep locally and not upload to OpenBenchmarking.org, how can they easily distribute it... Now if your Phoromatic Server is up to date and the PTS clients too, any custom (e.g. "local/") test or any other test profile that is accessible by the Phoromatic Server can automatically be served to PTS clients when requested. Currently there is no nice user-interface for managing that behavior or for uploading new tests through a web UI, but will likely come in the future. Contact us if you need any custom engineering or other support around this functionality.

- Improved managing/recording of "test notes" or other complementary information that would be wise to be collected during the benchmarking process.

- Improvements to the phoronix-test-suite interactive mode for guided / easy-to-use usage of the Phoronix Test Suite.

- Improvements to phoronix-test-suite make-download-cache in addressing a corner case where some suite/test data might have not been previously cached.

- Finally introducing to the Phoronix Test Suite client a phoronix-test-suite search sub-command for searching local test results / test profiles / test suites rather than needing to rely upon search from OpenBenchmarking.org or the Phoromatic Server web UI.

- The phoronix-test-suite info sub-command has been improved when passing it a test. Now displayed is the OpenBenchmarking.org change-log for that particular test profile as well as any local test results on that system containing the particular test. Previously a test profile change-log was only readily viewable if navigating to the OpenBenchmarking.org website.

- Phodevi will now append the BIOS version to the motherboard string. In light of the BIOS version becoming more important following Spectre/Meltdown and also UEFI/BIOS-driven performance improvements on the AMD side too, it's proving more useful now to always show the BIOS/UEFI version of the motherboard.

- Phodevi has also seen a major rework to its software/hardware property handler and various detection improvements.

- The Phoronix Test Suite's pts_Graph can once again generate vertical bar graphs if configured via the bar_graphs_horizontal = false in the ~/.phoronix-test-suite/graph-config.json. Back during Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 development when reworking pts_Graph, vertical bar graphs were dropped in favor of just always using horizontal bar graphs. But a request came in to have vertical bar graphs, so they are optionally now supported too and ported to using the latest pts_Graph interfaces.

That's the highlights of Phoronix Test Suite development over the past week by your's truly. There's other exciting changes coming up soon for Phoronix Test Suite 7.8 before it officially ships by the end of February. Download this open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software from Phoronix-Test-Suite.com or GitHub.