The First Release Of Phoronix Test Suite "Sokndal"
Being released this Thursday is the first development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.8-Sokndal. The final 4.8 release isn't happening for another three months, but for those wishing to help out and provide feedback but aren't comfortable with Git, here's a tagged snapshot.
In particular with Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 Milestone 1, feedback is being requested in particular on the min / max reporting on graphs and the text CLI. If you didn't read that article, check it out and there's also screenshots for extra convenience. This added reporting is available in 4.8 Milestone 1.
There was a mixture of feedback provided, but additional thoughts for this feature -- or related requests -- and how to best visually represent this data is still appreciated. Thanks!
Aside from the min/max work, there's continued work on the Apple OS X support. Found in this release is a fix for the cpu.freq sensor on OS X and fallback support for using ioreg for caluclating the Apple OS X system's power draw for the sys.power sensor for showing the overall system power consumption. This has been tested on the new 2013 Apple MacBook Air with Intel Core i5 "Haswell" CPU.
Another Phodevi change benefiting multiple operating systems is better detection of multiple monitor models for systems running an X.Org Server.
Beyond these changes, there's an assortment of other small bug-fixes and other changes found in Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 Milestone 1.
Some other planned work for Sokndal to be released in Q3'13 include:
- The HTML5-based user-interface may finally make its public debut. This has long been a work-in-progress and is still being held up by having compelling art assets, but an easy-to-use HTML5 interface for interacting with PTS is coming. This is for those who want a GUI rather than the command-line (since the GTK2 GUI has long been deprecated for PTS) and as well for powering our Linux Live DVD/USB benchmarking environment that provides a fully standardized software stack. The official plan is for the HTML5 interface to be part of Phoronix Test Suite 5.0 as a hard requirement, but an early debut could come for Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.
- Internationalization support in the form of GNU gettext support is being worked on. Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 should optionally support using php-gettext. The initial languages to be worked on for this support will be Russian, German, and possibly Norwegian.
- Reworking Phodevi (the Phoronix Device Interface library) to better support dynamically exposing new hardware/software monitoring sensors, plus some other changes.
- On the back burner has been toying with porting Phodevi to being a C library. Phodevi exposes various hardware/software functions in a uniform way regardless of operating system or driver (e.g. NVIDIA vs. AMD Catalyst vs. Mesa/Gallium3D) and makes it very easy to query various hardware vendor/model strings and other hardware attributes in a very easy way.
Phodevi could be useful to many other projects, so it could be useful to being in C plus being a C library could allow it to tap other kernel APIs on the different operating systems not otherwise exposed in a scriptable manner. The library could then still interface with PHP as a PHP module. However, porting the Phoronix Device Interface is still being evaluated and is a low priority project for me at the moment.
Any other feedback or feature requests for the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org are very much appreciated and welcome -- either via email, Twitter, or the forums. Commercial support, custom engineering engagements, and other professional services are also offered for our industry-leading automated testing and benchmarking platform.
The latest release of our cross-platform open-source benchmarking software can be downloaded at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.
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