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Phoronix Test Suite Changelog

What's new in Phoronix Test Suite 6.6.1

Sep 29, 2016
  • Various minor BSD support improvements.
  • A phoronix-test-suite list-not-installed-tests has been added for convenience of seeing tests available that aren't currently installed on the system, rather than using just list-installed-tests or list-tests.
  • A phoronix-test-suite php-conf sub-command that just provides some PHP-related diagnostics information about PHP extensions being used or not.
  • Detection for the QupZilla browser when no other browser or alias is present on the system for being able to auto-launch the results viewer.
  • Phodevi has been support for reporting overclocked memory frequencies when properly exposed via dmidecode.
  • The PTS External Dependencies XML has been added with optional dependency support for Python SciPy and Python SciKit Learn packages, which is needed by the new scikit-learn test profile.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 6.0.0 (Nov 17, 2015)

  • New Phoromatic UI:
  • Since the open-source Phoromatic Server was merged into the mainline Phoronix Test Suite code-base in Phoronix Test Suite 5, our test orchestration and management component has seen many significant additions throughout the 5.x releases. With Phoronix Test Suite 6.0, many new features continue to be added to the built-in Phoromatic server and client. One of the visible changes with Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 is that the site layout has been revised and there's initial support for mobile devices. The theme has also been updated to be more cohesive with the new result viewer and Phoronix Test Suite site layout.
  • New Result Viewer:
  • The local Phoronix Test Suite result viewer has been completely rewritten. Previously the viewer relied upon XSL for styling the result viewer, but with the browser support for it beginning to sway, the new viewer has been written to just utilize HTML and JavaScript for processing the XML result data. This new viewer has been tested on all major web-browsers and is working out much better. Beyond the internal changes, the default theme of the result viewer has been updated to better jive with the new Phoronix-Test-Suite.com site that rolled out some weeks ago.
  • More Phoromatic Additions:
  • The Phoromatic Server now has a new settings option for auto-authenticating new clients to automatically approve new systems attempting to connect to a Phoromatic account. The Phoromatic Server now also has support for exporting results as XML directly from the web interface, alongside the PDF and CSV result exporting. The Phoromatic Server also now has a test profiles page for showing basic test information along with results associated with a given test, similar to functionality found on OpenBenchmarking.org.
  • Low-Level Improvements:
  • A lot of the internal, low-level code of the Phoronix Test Suite's pts-core was significantly reworked. In fact, a lot of code that dates back to Phoronix Test Suite pre-1.0 was rewritten to take advantage of modern PTS interfaces and new PHP language features. This rework yields significant speed improvements (covered in the next section) while allowing for new functionality to be more easily implemented thanks to the cleaner and more streamlined code-base. When the Phoronix Test Suite was originally written, it wasn't designed around the yet-to-be-conceived OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoromatic while the new code does better accommodate these new components and other yet-to-be-announced features. In particular, Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 should respond much better for doing big data analytics on massive performance result sets.
  • Greater Performance:
  • While the pre-Hammerfest code works fine for all users running the Phoronix Test Suite individually and just running as many benchmarks to your delight on a system, the low-level re-work was driven in part for ensuring greater efficiency out of companies running their own internal Phoromatic or OpenBenchmarking.org servers. Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 may not seem much faster when you're just running a couple benchmarks on the system, but when rendering thousands of results in real-time for display, there's a dramatic speed-up.
  • When using the Phoronix Test Suite's own self-hosting benchmarking (phoronix-test-suite debug-self-test or phoronix-test-suite benchmark pts-self-test for it in the self-hosting test profile mode), the performance improvements of Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 are quite clear. The total time of the test that stresses all of the hot code-paths of the software dropped from 617 seconds to complete to just over 200 seconds... In other words, about three times faster all through this Phoronix Test Suite update with the same PHP stack.
  • One of the big focuses with the low-level re-work for Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 was on improving the graph rendering process: from the parsing of the result XML to generating the respective SVG or PNG graphs and then passing them off to the local result viewer, PDF result file, or dynamically serving them on OpenBenchmarking.org or Phoromatic. Thanks to the successful rework, the graph rendering process is significantly faster. With all of the internal tests done, this graph rendering process is about 4x faster than Phoronix Test Suite 5.8! If you're just running the Phoronix Test Suite locally you may not notice any difference when it already took less than one second, but on OpenBenchmarking.org where millions of graphs are rendered each month, it's a big impact on system resources. This is also of much benefit to our LinuxBenchmarking.com reference tracker where now it takes significantly less time to dynamically pull up a lot of historical benchmark results. For Phoromatic users, it will also mean much less time is needed when running large comparisons on existing results or looking at the performance of your systems under test for several months/years.
  • Besides being much faster, pts-core uses significantly less memory during these heavy tasks. With Phoronix Test Suite 5.8.1 the peak memory usage came up to almost 1GB when rendering thousands of results at once while now with Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 the peak memory usage is around a 4x improvement. Again, this will be most dramatic for Phoromatic and OpenBenchmarking.org users.
  • Lastly, another low-level improvement made was a big rework that happened within the graphing code (pts_Graph). The changes will allow for our graphs to be richer and more extensible moving forward, but an immediate win -- besides partially allowing the faster performance -- is that pts_Graph takes care of generating more-optimized SVG graphs. Common graph types are now roughly half the size as with previous versions of the Phoronix Test Suite. PNG/JPEG graphs continue to be supported for integration into PDF files as well as for supporting legacy web browsers.
  • Reworked Sensor Monitoring:
  • There was a significant rework to how the Phodevi's (Phoronix Device Interface) sensor monitoring works. The new sensor framework is now properly multi-threaded, much more extensible, and now also supports the dynamic creation of sensors in cases of desiring to monitor CPU usage or temperatures on a per-core basis rather than just the overall package or when looking to otherwise sub-divide the sensor data. The Phoronix Test Suite sensors behave in the same way via the MONITOR= environment variable and phoronix-test-suite system-sensors.
  • Phodevi Support Additions:
  • There's now support for the GPU thermal monitoring on more hardware (including the NVIDIA Jetson TX1), version detection for the X.Org Server running as non-root on Debian, NVMe solid-state storage detection, AMDGPU DRM detection, BcacheFS super-block detection, and more.
  • Linux Perf Subsystem Module:
  • There's a new module called linux_perf that supports reporting various Linux perf subsystem performance counters on a per-test-run basis. This module is automatically loaded when the LINUX_PERF=1 environment variable is set prior to running the Phoronix Test Suite.
  • Performance-Per-Dollar Module:
  • Another new Phoronix Test Suite module provides automated performance-per-dollar graphs based upon the user-supplied price information for the component/system under test. It's an easy way of running a cost analysis to complement the raw performance figures. This module is enabled automatically via the COST_PERF_PER_DOLLAR= environment variable and setting it to the dollar value desired for the current test run.
  • Plus More:
  • There's also various improvements in other areas of the Phoronix Test Suite, Windows support updates, DragonFlyBSD external dependency handling via DPorts pkg rather than pkgsrc, pass/fail testing improvements, the estimated date/time for test completion is now shown on the CLI besides the estimated time remaining, better support for stateless systems, and other smaller changes.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 Milestone 4 (Oct 26, 2015)

  • Over the earlier development milestones are some new features to PTS 6.0 M4 with feature-development still taking place this cycle. Most noticeably there is now a Linux kernel perf subsystem module for the Phoronix Test Suite: Using Linux's Perf For Providing More Automated Performance Counter Metrics. See that article about tapping perf's performance event counters for any test profile / benchmark you're running!
  • Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 Milestone 4 also begins the re-work of the Phoromatic Server's web-interface for managing accounts. The new UI is still a work-in-progress but is more cleaned-up, more mobile phone/tablet friendly, and has other benefits with its responsive design.
  • With this new PTS development release are also a few bug-fixes, tweaks to the grapher, and other changes.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 Milestone 3 (Oct 10, 2015)

  • This newest Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 development release has more SVG optimizations in pts_Graph, support for auto-authenticating/auto-approved clients for Phoromatic Servers as a new account setting option, NVMe /dev/nvme* detection, a NO_HTTPS environment variable if wishing to forcefully disable HTTPS usage to instead use only HTTP, and a variety of small fixes/enhancements throughout pts-core.
  • Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 M3 also has external dependency improvements with the DragonFlyBSD support being rewritten to use dports pkg rather than pkgsrc on older versions of DragonFlyBSD. There's also been an assortment of other smaller enhancements/tweaks to benefit various *BSD platforms and other similar non-Linux platforms that don't receive as much development attention.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.8.1 (Oct 10, 2015)

  • pts-core: Misc warning fixes
  • pts-core: Fix result file validation against XML schema

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.8.0 (Jun 5, 2015)

  • MIPS support improvements
  • Faster rendering of result files and other data processing improvements
  • Stress-run improvements
  • System sensor monitoring via the Phoromatic UI
  • Addition of the Phoromatic Results Export Viewer
  • Various Linux hardware & software detection improvements
  • Allow Phoronix Test Suite clients to be self-updated via update script passed from the Phoromatic Server
  • Mongoose web server support for the Phoromatic Server's HTTP instance
  • Support viewing system client logs via the Phoromatic Server UI
  • Numerous other improvements to Phoromatic

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.8.0 Milestone 1 (Apr 2, 2015)

  • pts-core: Start moving possible deployment scripts into deploy/ directory
  • pts-core: Move phoromatic-client and phoromatic-server Upstart job files to deploy/
  • pts-core: Move phoromatic-client and phoromatic-server systemd service files to deploy/
  • pts-core: Add very basic result-file-to-json sub-command
  • pts-core: Drop AnonymousHardwareReporting / AnonymousSoftwareReporting as no longer used on OpenBenchmarking.org
  • Pull in JuJu scripts from https://github.com/juju-solutions/pts to deploy/juju
  • phodevi: More allowance for clients to recover Internet connection / server communication failure
  • phoromatic: Clean-up main page schedule for schedules with no associated systems
  • phoromatic: Show matching ticket results in the compare results column on results page
  • phoromatic: Allow results page to be limited to particular hash or ticket matches
  • phoromatic: Allow results page search box to also search system's hardware/software components
  • phoromatic: Fix for removing a system from all groups on the "system group editing" systems page
  • phoromatic: Allow per-system overriding of whether automatic power-offs of system are permitted
  • phoromatic: Get rid of block-poweroff file check in client module now that it can be done per-system from server-side
  • phoromatic: Allow WoL power-ups for honoring benchmark tickets
  • phoromatic: Unify more code from start.php into phoromatic_server
  • phoromatic: Always unset the GRUB recordfail when applicable
  • phoromatic: Add "System Maintenance Table"
  • phoromatic: Add "PowerOnSystemDaily" setting option to ensure regardless of schedule that systems will at least power-up/communicate daily if enabled
  • phoromatic: New checkbox handling on results page to manage comparisons and multi-delete results
  • phoromatic: Start work on new main page

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.6.0 (Apr 1, 2015)

  • Many Phoromatic Improvements
  • Phoromatic Server Search Support
  • Phoromatic Server Stress-Run Controls
  • Support For Commenting/Annotating Result Files
  • Support For Custom System Variables To Be Used By Result File Strings
  • Rootadmin additions & Controls
  • Support For Results Via RSS
  • Allow One-Time Benchmark Runs & Issuing Of Benchmark Tickets
  • Allow Uploading Of Results To OpenBenchmarking.org Via Viewer Page
  • Allow Forming Of Custom Test Suites Via Build Suite Page
  • Add stress-run Sub Command To Phoronix Test Suite Client
  • OS X Support Improvements

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 Milestone 3 (Feb 16, 2015)

  • phoromatic: Allow triggers to be deleted
  • phoromatic: Rely on caching for determining pre-existing cached test profiles from the web UI
  • phoromatic: Add result RSS support
  • phoromatic: Add new option to results page
  • phoromatic: Enforce new PTS sign-on whenever the PTS core version changes due to potential interface changes
  • phoromatic: Working build suite page
  • phoromatic: Add support for local suites page
  • phoromatic: Add benchmark page
  • phoromatic: Add support for viewing issued benchmark tickets
  • phoromatic: Add option to force rebuild of results databases
  • phoromatic: Prepend system ID to result string when running multiple tests without variables

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 Milestone 1 (Jan 14, 2015)

  • pts-core: Add "short" display mode
  • pts-core: Add stress-run command to allow for concurrent stress testing / burn-in / torture testing
  • pts-core: Add TOTAL_LOOP_TIME support to stress-run
  • pts-core: Add TOTAL_LOOP_TIME=infinite support to stress-run for testing in an infinite loop
  • pts-core: Add support for libframetime output result parsing
  • phoromatic: Initial commit of basic tracker page
  • phoromatic: Better recovery of existing Phoromatic accounts on reloaded systems where the machine self ID changed
  • timed_screenshot: Fix for crash when PHP GD missing

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.4.1 (Dec 23, 2014)

  • Updated AppData XML for the Phoronix Test Suite.
  • The result parser in pts-core now has improved support for parsing CSV frame latency dumps as needed by newer test profiles, currently is needed by the new test of Civilization: Beyond Earth.
  • The phoronix-test-suite enterprise-setup sub-command. See the documentation for more details.
  • Various Phoromatic Server updates, including improved result strings when merging random result files, reporting of the IP/MAC addresses on the system claim page, and other minor enhancements.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.4.0 (Dec 9, 2014)

  • Major overhaul to the built-in Phoromatic Server
  • Avahi zero-conf networking support
  • Improved download cache handling
  • IBM POWER8 hardware detection improvements
  • Various code refactoring & other improvements

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.4.0 Milestone 6 (Nov 19, 2014)

  • pts-core: Fix result merging when PTS test identifier is null, use title string instead as identifier
  • pts-core: Check for PHP Sockets support
  • pts-core: Enhanced make-download-cache
  • pts-core: Enhance PHP_BIN detection
  • pts-core: Use system's zip library if PHP ZIP is not available
  • phoromatic: Upstart phoromatic-server job is working (tested on Scientific Linux 6.6)
  • phoromatic: Add "Run Test Schedule Now" button to test schedule page to allow for easy one-time/manual testing
  • phoromatic: Add some basic statistics to the rootadmin page
  • phoromatic: Allow the PhoromaticStorage location to be modified from the webUI when logging in as rootadmin
  • phoromatic: Allow the download cache location to be modified from the webUI when logging in as rootadmin
  • phoromatic: Allow the network proxy details to be modified from the webUI when logging in as rootadmin
  • phoromatic: Allow the HTTP / WebSocket ports to be modified from the webUI when logging in as rootadmin
  • phoromatic: Increase memory_limit on download cache downloads
  • phoromatic: Expose all possible video modes as test options
  • phoromatic: Show recent triggers on a test schedule's page
  • phoromatic: Add "Upload results to OpenBenchmarking.org" option to settings page
  • phoromatic: Fix for deactivating options on settings page
  • phoromatic: Remember last successful Phoromatic Server connection
  • phoromatic: Add reboot and shutdown commands to Phoromatic module

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.4.0 Milestone 5 (Nov 11, 2014)

  • pts-core: Improvements when running as a systemd service / daemon
  • pts-core: Prefer firefox over Epiphany browser
  • phoromatic: Implement email notifications on result uploads
  • phoromatic: Implement email notifications on system generated errors/warnings
  • phoromatic: Implement email notifications on new systems added
  • phoromatic: Allow easily comparing a result file to other results for that given schedule ID
  • phoromatic: Improve formatting of lists
  • phoromatic: Add times viewed to results
  • phoromatic: Add "show only results with variation" to result viewing page
  • phoromatic: Add result flagging to the main page
  • phoromatic: Allow other/unscheduled test results to be uploaded to the Phoromatic Server using the phoromatic.upload-result sub-command
  • phoromatic: Show file/path locations when starting the Phoromatic Server
  • phoromatic: Use a randomly chosen available port by default when starting the Phoromatic Server if no ports are defined
  • phoromatic: Add basic root administrator support to the Phoronix web interface
  • pts_Graph: Shrink size of sub-title text strings when they're too long

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.4.0 Milestone 4 (Nov 6, 2014)

  • pts-core: Add 3840 x 2160 (4K UHD) to more of the mode-setting fall-back modes
  • pts-core: Start working on support for using standard Linux file-system hierarchy when running as root as a service
  • pts-core: Add PhoromaticStorage option to Phoronix Test Suite user configuration XML file
  • phoromatic: Reporting of overall result counts for given test schedules
  • phoromatic: Report benchmarking / test run errors to server
  • phoromatic: Show system errors/warnings from the Phoromatic web UI
  • phoromatic: Don't attempt to re-run test schedules on clients if they previously reported errors/warnings for that schedule / trigger ID combination
  • phoromatic: Usernames need to be at least four characters long
  • phoromatic: Add a schedule overview to the schedules page
  • phoromatic: Add today's scheduled events to the side bar
  • phoromatic: Improve result identifier / title reporting for results
  • phoromatic: Implement "Power User" account level
  • phoromatic: Add normalize results option to the phoromatic result page
  • phoromatic: Support for jumping to test results page for XXX past days of test from schedule page
  • phodevi: IBM POWER hardware detection improvements

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.4.0 Milestone 3 (Oct 21, 2014)

  • Refinements to the Phoromatic web-user interface.
  • Basic service logging capabilities for Phoromatic client/servers initiated by systemd, etc.
  • Support for attempting to download files multiple times from remote download caches in case of connection/service failures.
  • A new scheduler creation interface from the Phoromatic web UI along with complete editing support.
  • Re-working of the "system groups" Phoromatic feature and should now be fully working and feature complete.
  • Support for Phoromatic users to create multiple users associated with the same account data, including support for "viewer accounts" that can view but not manipulate the account data.
  • An activity stream for showing Phoromatic user data associated with a particular account.
  • Support for merging results from the Phoromatic web UI.
  • Support for deleting results from the Phoromatic web UI.
  • Other improvements and refinements to the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic code.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.4.0 Milestone 1 (Sep 5, 2014)

  • pts-core: Sanitize pts_result_file user strings
  • pts-core: Don't set memory_limit with HHVM
  • pts-core: Drop phoromatic_legacy support (old Phoromatic.com version)
  • system_monitor: Correct perf-per-Watt calculation for LIB results
  • phodevi: Support Nouveau's pstate formatting changes to read core/mem MHz on newer kernels
  • phodevi: Support for reading monitor EDID over sysfs, decoding descriptors, and obtaining monitor name (should improve monitor name reporting for Intel Linux systems)
  • phodevi: Improved SoC detection
  • pts_LineGraph: Alignment fix for keys

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.2.1 (Jul 11, 2014)

  • pts-core: Add VDPAU as a dependency to the xorg-video external dependency on more platforms
  • pts-core: Don't check OpenBenchmarking.org credentials when the network is down
  • pts-core: Rework result-file-to-text sub-command, show text-based graph results
  • phodevi: Improve NVIDIA binary driver GPU utilization detection
  • phodevi: Add DDE / Deepin Desktop Environment detection
  • pts_Graph: Few minor graph alignment corrections

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.2.0 (Jun 6, 2014)

  • Tech Preview / Experimental Built-In Phoromatic Server
  • Result graphing improvements, including new box plot graphs
  • Phodevi software & hardware detection improvements
  • Phodevi Radeon GPU usage reporting via RadeonTOP
  • New Phoronix Test Suite sub-command options
  • Bug-fixes and other minor enhancements

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.2 Milestone 4 (May 29, 2014)

  • pts-core: Always report the CPU scaling governor to the system table
  • pts-core: Add auto-sort-result-file option
  • phoromatic: Improve the systems' page
  • phoromatic: Allow up to three connection failures before quitting
  • pts_Graph: Improved, cleaner, and more accurate rendering of the pts_OverViewGraph
  • pts_Graph: Make the horizontal box chart graph in good shape
  • pts_Graph: Revert earlier render_graph_value_ticks() change by mufasa72 as it produced inaccurate tick values
  • pts_Graph: use the horizontal box plot when rendering frame times for large number of results
  • pts_Graph: Various other graphing improvements

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.2 Milestone 2 (May 19, 2014)

  • pts-core: Add RUN_TESTS_IN_RANDOM_ORDER environment variable to cause tests to run in a random order
  • pts-core: Add sdl2-development to PTS External Dependencies
  • pts-core: Fix regression from 5.2m1 that broke some areas of the GUI / web interface
  • pts_Graph: Render min/avg/max stats at top of line graphs (thanks to mufasa72)

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.2 Milestone 1 (May 8, 2014)

  • The most notable work going on with Phoronix Test Suite 5.2 is the porting of Phoromatic to the modern PTS interfaces. With Phoronix Test Suite 5.2 it's possible to launch a local Phoromatic server instance via simply running phoronix-test-suite start-phoromatic-server and from there it will self-host all of its needs (with the only possible new requirement being PHP5 SQLite support). However, for today's first milestone release the support isn't quite in shape. The web interface is very different from the former Phoromatic code and I'm still porting the code to work with the new interfaces.
  • The new Phoromatic code with PTS 5.2m1 will work with for setting up systems and basic scheduling but isn't yet functional. Hopefully in the next week will have all of the code fully-functional against the latest PTS interfaces. Ideally there won't be any API or database schema breaks but I am not making any guarantees prior to the official 5.2.0 release. For organizations needing to host their results "behind the firewall" and outside of the OpenBenchmarking.org spectrum that will still require a commercial support license via the Phoronix Test Suite.
  • Besides the ongoing Phoromatic porting to support a self-hosting server from the Phoronix Test Suite client, other changes include various fixes, better support for outside environment variables, support for a range of test inputs to be supported, batch-run fixes, improvements for NVIDIA GPU core frequency detection on modern GPUs, and GPU usage reporting via the optional radeontop binary.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.0.1 (Apr 3, 2014)

  • More helpers have been added when entering invalid arguments to various phoronix-test-suite sub-commands.
  • External dependency improvements (32/64-bit Ubuntu fixes, added PCRE throughout).
  • HTTPS OpenBenchmarking.org communication is disabled by default to workaround reported proxy issues.
  • A edit-result-file sub-command has been added for changing a saved result file's title and description strings after the testing process. There's also a fix for ensuring result file descriptions properly update.
  • An AppData file is now shipped with the Phoronix Test Suite.
  • Various Arch Linux benchmarking improvements in better handling its stock PHP configuration and other system differences.
  • Other minor enhancements.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 5.0.0 Milestone 1 (Feb 7, 2014)

  • pts-core: Add web-server-launcher support
  • pts-core: Support starting HHVM as a web server
  • pts-core: Startup speed optimizations
  • pts-core: Cleaned up code error reporting/handling
  • pts-core: Add server remote access and password options to user-config.xml user configuration options
  • pts-core: Adjust handling of PTS OpenBenchmarking.org downloading of test profile order and hash handling
  • pts-core: Reduce unnecessary communication with OpenBenchmarking.org network server
  • pts-core: Support system identifier strings up to 64 characters
  • pts-core: Add LIMIT_ELAPSED_TEST_TIME to limit the amount of time (in minutes) for a given Phoronix Test Suite process to complete its testing
  • pts-core: Allow null descriptor strings
  • pts-core: Fix regex for version string
  • pts-core: Random fixes
  • phodevi: Various improvements
  • phodevi: Improved disk scheduler fallback reporting
  • documentation: Update to point out new Git location at github.com/phoronix-test-suite/ over Phorogit
  • nye_Xml: Fix for writing zeros in XML tags when using the "when not empty" function

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.6 (Dec 11, 2013)

  • DragonFlyBSD 3.6.0 support improvements.
  • Support for passing of test arguments to pre/interim/post test profile script hooks and support for debugging of these scripts within the existing debug-run mode.
  • Improvements for reading the terminal width. There's also some minor text formatting tweaks.
  • Phoronix Device Interface (Phodevi) improvements of reading monitor information on the binary NVIDIA Linux driver, improved multi-monitor resolution detection under X11 environments, and other tweaks.
  • Various bug-fixes.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.5 (Nov 22, 2013)

  • pts-core: Improve formatting of interrupt messages with the (default) concise display mode
  • pts-core: Don't remove test install files on installation failures
  • pts-core: Allow download-test-files command to use OpenBenchmarking.org IDs
  • pts-core: Don't dynamically increase the test run count when dealing with cache shares
  • pts-core: Fix for not opening the web-browser in batch mode
  • pts-core: Add zypper SUSE help support when not finding PHP
  • phodevi: Add support for Nouveau PSTATE parsing on Linux 3.13+
  • phodevi: Recognize 'HIS' (Hightech Information System) graphics cards
  • phodevi: Recognize 'ZOTAC' graphics cards
  • phodevi: Fix redundant monitor model reporting detection on Catalyst
  • phodevi: Add support for NVIDIA-Settings GPUUtilization in gpu.usage sensor

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.4 (Nov 9, 2013)

  • 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.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.3 (Oct 7, 2013)

  • Several external dependency updates, including to address the removal of the ia32-libs package from Ubuntu 13.10. With that said, pts-core now supports binding certain distribution packages to given versions of an operating system. There's also generic dependency changes and some Fedora activity.
  • Users of the Phoronix Test Suite behind proxies have reported issues in using HTTPS with OpenBenchmarking.org on PTS 4.8, which should now be resolved. Please contact us if anyone using a network proxy continues to experience problems in using the Phoronix Test Suite.
  • Users of xscreensaver and the latest version of the GNOME Shell should have more reliable disabling of their desktop's screensaver during the benchmarking process.
  • Phodevi has some improvements for better detecting the Intel graphics processor model on newer versions of the xf86-video-intel DDX driver due to string changes.
  • Other minor changes.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.2 (Aug 31, 2013)

  • The Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.2 update is very minor in nature and just takes care of a couple regression fixes concerning OpenBenchmarking.org integration.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.0 Milestone 5 (Aug 7, 2013)

  • 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.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.0 Milestone 4 (Jul 25, 2013)

  • ECS and eVGA graphics cards are now reported as part of the expanded AMD/NVIDIA AIB vendor detection support added in 4.8 Milestone 3.
  • Small changes to retain compatibility with Facebook's HHVM 2.1 HipHop Virtual Machine as an alternative to the reference PHP5.
  • Test profile download XML files can now specify SHA256 hash sums on top of MD5.
  • Phoronix Test Suite 5.x codenames of Plavsk, Khanino, Lipki, Dedilovo, and Belev have been added. While PTS codenames up to this point were Norwegian cities and using one county/state per major development series, now PTS5 turns to Russia. PTS 5.x codenames are from the Tulskaya oblast region.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.6.1 (Jun 7, 2013)

  • Supporting an ONLY_TEST_TYPES environment variable for independently overriding certain test profile types from being added to the test execution queue.
  • Changes for the extract-from-result-file, copy-run-in-result-file, reorder-result-file, rename-identifier-in-result-file, and remove-from-result-file sub-commands to properly open the correct web-browser. With those sub-commands, the composite XML file was being called directly rather than the HTML launcher file. For select desktops/platforms, XML files open in a IDE or text editor rather than the web-browser, namely on Apple OS X with XCode. With this change, using the proper web-browser is restored for these sub-commands.
  • Some batch mode improvements within the test run manager.
  • The Phoronix Device Interface (Phodevi) library has detection support for Haswell BMI2 support.
  • Phodevi's memory.usage sensor should now work on Apple OS X.
  • A new Phodevi sensor has been added, network.usage, for reporting the used network data traffic while running tests.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.4.1 / 4.6 Milestone 2 (May 16, 2013)

  • Improved compiler masking support.
  • Improved support for DragonFlyBSD with various external dependency packaging updates and other changes. This is coming as part of a new round of DragonFlyBSD 3.4 (and other BSD) benchmarking on Phoronix.com. Phoronix Test Suite 4.6 should run very well on recent DragonFlyBSD operating system versions.
  • A fix for cpu.freq (CPU Frequency) real-time reading on Apple OS X.
  • Various other minor changes.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.4.0 (Feb 27, 2013)

  • Phodevi Hardware/Software Detection Improvements
  • OpenBenchmarking.org Integration Enhancements
  • Improved Reporting Of Test Installation Errors
  • Improved Reporting Of Test Run-Time Errors
  • Improved BSD Operating System Support
  • Rewritten PTS External Dependencies Handling
  • Improved Compiler/User Flag Reporting On Test Results

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.4.0 Milestone 3 (Feb 14, 2013)

  • The external dependencies handling for test profiles to install necessary OS/platform dependencies has received a major overhaul in Forsand. The improvements make the dependency handling much more versatile and accommodating for out-of-tree packages, alternative compilers and other components, and supportive of Linux distributions and operating systems that haven't been "officially" tested with the Phoronix Test Suite. For users of existing tested distributions to the Phoronix Test Suite, dependency resolution and other operations are now handled faster too.
  • Initial support for using MacPorts for dependency management on Apple Mac OS X platforms. This will allow for more OpenBenchmarking.org test profiles to function with the Phoronix Test Suite. More OS X improvements and test profile verification will happen with the next Phoronix Test Suite 4.4 release while Milestone 3 is just prepping this MacPorts handling.
  • Improvements to the appropriate displaying of compiler flags/switches on the result graphs for various computational benchmarks.
  • The new F2FS file-system developed by Samsung as the "Flash Friendly File-System" for Linux is now properly detected based upon its magic number in the super block. The F2FS file-system is being introduced in the Linux 3.8 kernel. (Yes, coming soon on Phoronix.com are F2FS benchmarks.)
  • The Cryptfs, AuFS, LustreFS, and Panasas PanFS file-systems are also now properly detected too by Phodevi, the Phoronix Device Interface library.
  • Processors capable of supporting AVX2 (Advanced Vector Extensions 2) are now recognized with this attribute, such as Intel Haswell and Broadwell processors.
  • Various other minor enhancements and bug-fixes.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.4.0 Milestone 1 (Jan 24, 2013)

  • pts-core: Introduce 'common-dependencies' concept to PTS External Dependencies
  • pts-core: Fix reporting of some already installed dependencies
  • pts-core: Support for listing 'local/' tests from the list-supported-tests command
  • pts-core: Support for test profiles providing a 'support-check.sh' file
  • pts-core: Support for reporting the Graphics AA/AF values to the system notes table
  • pts-core: Add a public version of the TODO list
  • pts-core: Don't attempt copying install.log to install-failed.log on empty files
  • pts-core: Add fallback to allow matching an operating system to an external dependencies package list based upon the detected package manager
  • pts-core: When anonymous usage reporting is enabled, report test installation failures to OpenBenchmarking.org for analyzing problem
  • pts-core: Support for detecting common errors within test profile install failures and reporting the relevant information to the user
  • pts-core: When installing many tests and there are install failures, conveniently show the errors at the end
  • pts-core: When installing multiple tests, report any unknown test profiles/suites
  • pts-core: Faster loading of list-available-tests command by not forcing all test profile data be downloaded
  • pts-core: Progressively download OpenBenchmarking.org in list-available-suites command to display information faster
  • phodevi: Improve Nouveau video RAM memory capacity detection on newer Linux kernels
  • phodevi: Warning fix for Radeon GPU frequency detection
  • phodevi: Drop "special_settings_string" support
  • phodevi: Support for checking if the Gallium3D anti-aliasing level was overrode using GALLIUM_MSAA environment variable

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.2.0 (Dec 20, 2012)

  • pts-core: Fix SVG render detection on Firefox/Gecko 17.0
  • pts-core: Fix for breaking quoted args with internal spaces (reported by _rubio_)
  • pts-core: Add glibc-static to build-utilities external dependency on Fedora
  • pts-core: Fix for using the SKIP_TESTS environment variable causing a fatal error
  • pts-core: Phoronix Test Suite 4.4 is codenamed Forsand
  • phodevi: Improved detection of power consumption from batteries in certain Linux configurations

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.2 Milestone 3 (Nov 23, 2012)

  • pts-core: Don't report null times for estimated run-time
  • phodevi: Support for determining the build configuration on LLVM 3.2 where llvm-ld is llvm-link
  • phodevi: Hard fall-back support for detecting the xf86-video-modesetting driver usage
  • toggle_screensaver: Disable blanking of the terminal screen when running tests

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.2 Milestone 1 (Oct 8, 2012)

  • pts-core: Support download caches at /media/*/*/download-cache/
  • pts-core: Support OPENGL_DRIVER as a run-time variable
  • pts-core: For external dependency handling, treat Linaro as Ubuntu
  • pts-core: Check for null distribution-specific external dependency package names
  • pts-core: Formatting improvements to result-file-to-text output
  • pts-core: Add openssl-development as a new test external dependency
  • pts-core: Don't warn on out-of-date test profiles when being run in batch mode
  • phodevi: Support for reading the VirtualBox version of Beta/RC versions
  • phodevi: Better support detection for Exynos ARM cores
  • phodevi: Initial support for reading node power over IPMI
  • phodevi: Initial support for reading core temperature over IPMI
  • phodevi: On Linux attempt to determine the install RAM's vendor and product part number
  • toggle_screensaver: Support for module suspending the Xfce4 desktop screensaver using xfconf-query
  • pts_Graph: Fix for vertical/rotated text in SVG -> GD translation

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.0.1 (Aug 21, 2012)

  • pts-core: Allow shortened test profile versions inputted by user to be expanded to matching latest version in stream
  • pts-core: Allow shortened test suite versions inputted by user to be expanded to matching latest version in stream
  • pts-core: Add list-unsupported-tests option for debugging purposes
  • pts-core: Add subversion as a PTS External Dependency
  • pts-core: Add git as a PTS External Dependency
  • pts-core: Add superlu as a PTS External Dependency
  • pts-core: Add libtool as a PTS External Dependency
  • pts-core: Hash within the result file all of the contained tests
  • pts-core: Support for anonymous usage reporting of test installation times to OpenBenchmarking.org
  • phodevi: Fix memory RAM DIMM count detection in select configurations
  • phodevi: Intel GPU string reporting improvement
  • phodevi: Support for detecting multiple GPUs on Apple OS X
  • phodevi: Support for detecting Gallium3D XA
  • phodevi: Support for llvm-link on LLVM 3.2svn

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.0.0 (Jul 23, 2012)

  • New Result Viewer Interface
  • Performance-per-Watt / Energy Monitoring Improvements
  • Hardware/Software Detection Improvements
  • Greater Documentation
  • New Result Analytical Features

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 / 4.0 Milestone 4 (Jun 30, 2012)

  • pts-core: Support download caches at /run/media/*/*/download-cache/
  • pts-core: Set SKIP_TEST_SUPPORT_CHECKS=1 environment variable for debugging purposes to run tests on unsupported platforms
  • pts_Graph: Only render as much room for pts_OverViewGraph as there are for what will be rendered (bar graph values)
  • phodevi: Ensure DVD drives don't get reported on BSD operating systems when requesting disk drives
  • phodevi: Improve graphics processor detection on Solaris 11 11/11 for non-NVIDIA GPUs
  • system_monitor: Add support for handling i915_energy monitor reading in microJoules for each test run
  • system_monitor: Place timer support for individual test runs within the module

New in Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 Milestone 3 (May 22, 2012)

  • pts-core: Reformat user configuration input on test run
  • pts-core: Improve no-network support handling
  • pts-core: Streamline detailed-system-info collection
  • pts-core: Invalid command improvements
  • pts-core: Various alterations
  • pts-core: Make greater use of trigger_error
  • pts-core: Generate more relevant default result identifier strings based on subsystems under test on empty input
  • phodevi: Support to attempt to detect the file-system underneath ecryptfs
  • pts-core: Debian control script update

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 (Mar 19, 2012)

  • Improved Disk Reporting
  • Improved Compiler Option/Configuration Reporting
  • New Graph Renderer - Improved ARM / Mobile Device Support
  • Download Caching Enhancements
  • Re-written Graphics Event Checker
  • Support For Apple Mac OS X 10.8

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 Milestone 2 (Feb 21, 2012)

  • pts-core: Allow up to 1MB of system log files to be attached and uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org
  • pts-core: Fix test profile / test suite identifier base name parsing on version handling
  • pts-core: Add cairo-development as an external dependency for Cairo drawing library development
  • pts-core: Initial support for compiler masking / compiler option intercepting on test installation
  • pts-core: Support symlinked ~/.drirc to test install directories
  • pts-core: Support for Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" Developer Preview 1
  • phodevi: Better recognition of Samsung disk drives
  • phodevi: NVIDIA CUDA (nvcc) detection and report it to system information compiler area
  • phodevi: Detection support for Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization server
  • phodevi: Detection support for Parallels Virtualization
  • phodevi: Better VMware DDX driver detection when using vmwgfx
  • phodevi: Support for detecting VirtualBox version using vboxguest kernel module information
  • phodevi: Support for detecting Portland Group (PGI) Workstation compilers
  • phodevi: Improved detection of Hitachi disk drives
  • phodevi: Support for Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" Developer Preview 1
  • pts_Graph: Rendering corrections of SVG DOM IR

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.8 Milestone 1 (Jan 17, 2012)

  • pts-core: When time-zone is not set in PHP, attempt to query it from the host system
  • pts-core: Fix for handling user variable swaps on the result identifier
  • pts-core: Major enhancements to MATISK testing module
  • pts-core: Fix for some hardware/software comparisons being turned into line graphs
  • pts-core: Dump some common / important environmental variables to system log area
  • pts-core: Migrate to a JSON-based graph configuration file at ~/.phoronix-test-suite/graph-config.json
  • pts_Graph: New version of pts_Graph that uses SVG DOM IR directly
  • pts-core: Allow pts_svg_dom to be converted to JPEG/PNG using new library as bilde_renderer replacement
  • phodevi: Add some fall-back graphics detection support of Texas Instruments OMAP / Samsung EXYNOS
  • phodevi: Fall-back graphics detection support for the ARM Mali
  • phodevi: NVIDIA TEGRA hardware detection improvements (as tested on a TEGRA-2 CompuLab TrimSlice)
  • phodevi: Further fall-back support for further detecting EXT3/EXT4 file-system from user-space
  • phodevi: Improve Arch Linux OS detection on at least ARM platforms
  • phodevi: Screen resolution fall-back of reading frame-buffer virtual size
  • phodevi: Improved Intel chipset detection parsing from Xorg.0.log when /sys/kernel/debug/ isn't readable
  • installer: Installer update

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.6 (Dec 13, 2011)

  • Enhanced Support For BSD, Solaris Operating Systems
  • Various Graphing Improvements
  • Expanded Phodevi Library Coverage
  • Greater OpenBenchmarking.org Integration - Various Bug Fixes

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.6 Milestone 3 (Dec 1, 2011)

  • pts-core: On large result files, auto-remove redundant words present in all identifiers
  • pts-core: When a command fails, allow helpful user information to be provided on a per-command basis
  • pts-core: More efficient trimming of redundant spaces
  • pts-core: Fix for identifiers being passed to graphs being corrupted when passing them multiple times
  • phodevi: Fix Mesa OpenGL detection on Solaris 11 when the NVIDIA binary blob is installed but using Mesa
  • phodevi: Don't report 'blkdev' on Solaris 11 as a disk drive
  • phodevi: Change GPU caching to allow overclocked speeds to show without rebooting
  • phodevi: Better support xf86-video-ati DDX driver detection in X Server fall-back mode
  • system_monitor: Fix for running same test multiple times when system_moitor module is loaded
  • pts_Graph: Improve key rendering

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.6 Milestone 2 (Nov 8, 2011)

  • pts-core: When the PHP version in use changes, re-run the recommended/required PHP checks
  • pts-core: Improve short SHA1 detection for results tracker
  • pts-core: Report notice when no OpenBenchmarking.org repository index is present and fails to fetch
  • pts-core: Improve Internet connectivity detection check
  • pts-core: When reporting a command error, report the most appropriate command name string
  • pts-core: Begin work on custom error handler for generated errors in code itself
  • pts-core: Add initial support for internal pts-core warning/notice/error handler
  • pts-core: Initialize the network support earlier in the client initialization process
  • pts-core: When running a test and saving results, show recently saved test results
  • phodevi: When QEMU virtualization is detected, try to report QEMU version to system layer
  • phodevi: Support for reporting the XOP, FMA3, and FMA4 instruction sets
  • phodevi: Begin merging is_genuine() support from Openbenchmarking.org into respective Phodevi components
  • phodevi: Improve Catalyst OpenGL driver detection with soon-to-be-released versions
  • phodevi: Improve GNOME version detection when using GNOME3 fall-back mode
  • pts_Graph: Allow normalized numbers to appear in the result file table
  • pts_Graph: When too many lines are being plotted, auto-convert to scalar
  • bilde_renderer: Improve automated color selection/shifting

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.6 Milestone 1 (Oct 21, 2011)

  • pts-core: Code clean-ups
  • pts-core: Allow results to be rendered in reverse order
  • pts-core: Add detailed-system-info command for reporting more system attributes
  • pts-core: Fix regression of NO_EXTERNAL_DEPENDENCIES and NO_PHODEVI_CACHE not working
  • pts-core: Add dump-openbenchmarking-indexes option for debugging
  • pts-core: Fix for extract-from-result-file not correctly formatting the new saved results name
  • phodevi: No longer report if CPU power savings (CnQ, EIST, etc) is active since it's now widespread across all desktop hardware
  • phodevi: Improve detection of low RAM capacities (1GB)
  • phodevi: Add support for detecting greater CPU features
  • phodevi: Improve system memory detection on Solaris/Illumos operating systems
  • phodevi: Improve disk device detection on Solaris/Illumos operating systems
  • phodevi: Ensure no words in motherboard identifier string are repeated
  • phodevi: Don't print lspci errors
  • phodevi: Few string reporting tweaks found from AMD Bulldozer FX system
  • phodevi: Virtualization detection support for Xen DomU guests
  • phodevi: Detect VirtualBox version from guest VM
  • phodevi: Expose a cpu.power sensor that provides monitoring of CPU power consumption (new feature to AMD 15h Bulldozer CPUs)
  • phodevi: Convert CPU model strings like 'Intel Core i7 M 620' to 'Intel Core i7 620M' to better reflect Intel product marketing names
  • phodevi: Basic ICC detection
  • phodevi: Improvements to LLVM/Clang version detection and code revision reporting
  • pts_Graph: Allow disconnected lines of results on line graphs
  • pts_Graph: Plot entire lines of data on line graphs when there are no identifiers
  • pts_Graph: Fix for the averages on line graphs not appearing
  • toggle_screensaver: Support for toggling the GNOME3 AC display settings

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.4 (Sep 13, 2011)

  • pts-core: Download the SHA1 package hash for test profiles/suites when fetching the test itself rather than using repo index
  • pts-core: Don't produce an error when open_basedir is in use by the PHP binary running the Phoronix Test Suite
  • pts-core: Fix compacting of large multi-way comparisons for compacted systems table view
  • system_monitor: Don't log negative values
  • pts_Graph: Fix key length detection for the heat-map bar graph

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.2.1 (Jun 29, 2011)

  • Watts Up Pro USB power meter support. The power monitoring Phodevi (Phoronix Device Interface library) module in Phoronix Test Suite 3.2.1 introduces support for the Watts Up Pro power meter. This low-cost (~$100 USD) power meter has a USB interface that the Phoronix Test Suite is able to automatically poll -- in a similar manner to the Phodevi battery consumption monitoring -- to plot the Wattage in real-time during the testing process. This newly-added support was used for the recent power articles: The Leading Cause Of The Recent Linux Kernel Power Problems, Radeon Driver Power Management Has Room For Improvement, and Surprising Power Consumption Of Ubuntu 11.04 vs. Windows 7.
  • A fix for a potential issue where the web-browser would launch the Phoronix Test Suite Results Viewer when running in batch mode even when auto-launching the web-browser is disabled.
  • A fix for launching the web-browser under Microsoft Windows platforms.
  • Various tweaks and other small bug-fixes.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.2.0 (Jun 17, 2011)

  • Facebook HipHop Compiler Support
  • Improved Software Detection
  • Improved Hardware Detection
  • Support For New System Sensors
  • Improved Wine Compatibility
  • Interactive Text Mode Support

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.2 Milestone 4 (Jun 1, 2011)

  • pts-core: Don't confuse changed hardware as being part of a results tracker
  • pts-core: Interactive mode improvements for Moscow
  • pts-core: Allow unordered multi-way comparisons
  • pts-core: Detect short SHA1 hashes at the end of the identifier string as being part of a results tracker
  • pts-core: Rework pts_bypass class into pts_flags
  • pts-core: Rename SKIP_EXTERNAL_DEPENDENCIES_CHECK to NO_EXTERNAL_DEPENDENCIES
  • pts-core: Add AlwaysUploadResultsToOpenBenchmarking option to user-config.xml
  • pts-core: Restore support for just passing the test profile base name to SKIP_TESTS environmental variable
  • pts-core: Report average value of line graphs to terminal for concise display mode
  • phodevi: Intel GMCH thermal monitoring sensor
  • phodevi: Support monitoring the GPU power consumption on Intel hardware using the gpu.power sensor
  • phodevi: Support determing Intel GPU load via number of commands processed per second
  • phodevi: Support for unity-2d desktop version detection (normal Unity has already been supported)
  • phodevi: Support for gnome-shell desktop version detection
  • documentation: Move out the auto-generated PDF documentation (it will be on web server) and just leave in the HTML documentation in tree at the request of Debian packager

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.2 Milestone 3 (May 19, 2011)

  • pts-core: Rework test install path handling
  • pts-core: Finish eliminating XML-based definitions
  • pts-core: Increase PHP compatibility
  • pts-core: Facebook HipHop should now fully work with the PTS client
  • pts-core: Support real-time monitoring the Nouveau GPU frequency via the gpu.freq call as exposed by system_monitor module
  • pts-core: Begin improving the auto-generated result file descriptions
  • phodevi: Internal clean-ups
  • phodevi: Recognition support for GPFS file-system
  • phodevi: Intel SNB frequency reporting
  • documentation: Begin auto-generation of HTML documentation in a single file that's the same content as the PDF user guide

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.2 Milestone 2 (Apr 28, 2011)

  • The color allocator in bilde_renderer has been improved/fixed so that the colors between multiple bars and lines on graphs should be more distinct, etc.
  • There's various improvements to the interactive text mode (accessible by running phoronix-test-suite interactive).
  • There's now support for the Phoronix Test Suite to automatically un-install tests whenever they are no longer needed in the actively running test queue. This is useful for embedded environments as well as live environments where everything may be running from system memory. The downside, of course, is that each test must be installed then every-time prior to running it again. This feature is disabled by default but can be manipulated by the RemoveTestInstallOnCompletion XML option.
  • Support for parsing the system/motherboard's serial number. This isn't used by default in the Phoronix Test Suite nor uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org, but is just provided for special enterprise cases where the serial number has been requested.
  • If running a nested version of the Phoronix Test Suite within Wine, the host system's display server and driver should now be reported.
  • Various other bug-fixe

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.0.1 (Mar 15, 2011)

  • pts-core: Restore make-download-cache option and port to PTS3 architecture
  • pts-core: Avoid PHP warning when cache share restoration fails
  • pts-core: Ensure all rows in system tables are condensed where possible
  • pts-core: Don't break dates into multi-way comparisons
  • pts-core: Fix for specifying absolute repository/[suite|test] such as for local tests
  • pts_Graph: Support multiple identifier lines (delimited by ' - ') on multi-way comparisons with horizontal bar graph
  • phodevi: Ensure Apple is reported as the manufacturer on Mac computers

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Beta 1 (Jan 10, 2011)

  • pts-core: Fixes for using the local test profile/suite repository
  • pts-core: More minor performance optimizations along common OpenBenchmarking.org code paths
  • pts-core: External dependencies support for Amazon Linux AMI on EC2 Cloud Service
  • pts-core: Fix crashes when using build-suite and result-file-to-suite commands
  • pts-core: Fix for list-installed-tests command not listing any installed tests
  • pts_Graph: Underlying fixes for OpenBenchmarking.org
  • pts_Graph: Properly align background dashed lines
  • pts_Graph: Fix divide by zero error on rare cases of inserting zeros to maintain ordering index
  • phodevi: Improve NVIDIA GPU model detection when missing glxinfo
  • phodevi: Append Gallium3D version number to OpenGL string
  • phodevi: Ensure more accurate GPU name reporting than codenames when using Gallum3D drivers
  • phodevi: More robust motherboard detection on different sysfs nodes
  • phodevi: BSD hardware detection improvements (tested on DragonflyBSD 2.9-DEVELOPMENT)
  • phodevi: Detection support for other file-systems via their super blocks (OpenAFS, CIFS, SSHFS, etc)
  • phodevi: Support for reading NVIDIA core/memory clock speeds from the Nouveau driver when using latest DRM with performance levels
  • phodevi: Support for GPU core thermal monitoring when using the recent Nouveau DRM driver
  • phodevi: Support for reading VRAM capacity with TTM drivers when the kernel sysfs debug interface is enabled

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Alpha 3 (Dec 2, 2010)

  • pts-core: Fix test suites failing to run where it'd get caught in an infinite loop
  • pts-core: Fix for suite support on Iveland
  • pts-core: Add ReferenceID tag to result-file specification
  • pts-core: Support for remote download caches on test installation without relying upon pts-install.xml index
  • pts-core: Add SaveTestLogs to user-config.xml for now toggling whether to save the test logs
  • pts-core: Add an XML Schema XSD covering the result-file
  • pts-core: Add an XML Schema XSD covering the test-suite
  • pts-core: Add an XML Schema XSD covering the test-profile-downloads
  • pts-core: Add an XML Schema XSD covering the results-parser
  • pts-core: Add an XML Schema XSD covering the test-profile
  • pts-core: On client program startup, report any missing PHP extensions that are required or recommended
  • pts-core: TEST PROFILE XML SPEC CHANGE: TestInformation/Version -> TestInformation/AppVersion
  • pts-core: TEST PROFILE/SUITE XML SPEC CHANGE: Split RequiresCoreVersion tag into RequiresCoreVersionMin and RequiresCoreVersionMax
  • pts-core: Add InternalTags to XML test profile schema
  • pts-core: Drop support for ~/pts-test-note as the capabilities are now found within InternalTags using a cleaner method
  • pts-core: Better the support for Illumos OpenIndiana b147
  • pts-core: Support still saving test results when using the system_monitor module even when all tests being run are of NO_RESULT type
  • phodevi: Few Mac OS X support improvements
  • phodevi: Support NVIDIA GPU core usage monitoring via nvidia-smi
  • phoromatic: HTTPS connection support, install the Phoromatic.com SSL certificate
  • pts: Update apache test profile against upstream Apache 2.2.17
  • pts: Update build-apache test profile against upstream Apache 2.2.17
  • pts: Update build-mplayer test profile against upstream MPlayer 1.0rc3
  • pts: Update compress-7zip test profile against upstream p7zip 9.13
  • pts: Update ffmpeg test profile against upstream FFmpeg 0.6.1
  • pts: Update graphics-magick test profile against GraphicsMagick 1.3.12
  • pts: Update pgbench test profile against PostgreSQL 9.0.1
  • pts: Update sqlite test profile against SQLite 3.7.3
  • pts: Update x264 test profile against upstream x264 2010-11-22
  • pts: Update ramspeed test profile against RAMspeed SMP (RAMSMP) 3.5.0
  • pts: Add the CLOMP OpenMP LLNL benchmark
  • pts: First pass at validating all test profiles
  • pts: Verify each upstream test profile's compatibility on Solaris, BSD, and MacOSX

New in Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Alpha 1 (Nov 10, 2010)

  • This release comes after about three months of solid development on Iveland and there's about two or three more months of development left before Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 will officially see the light of day. Iveland Alpha 1 incorporates most of the internal pts-core restructuring changes needed to support OpenBenchmarking.org and other new PTS3 capabilities. With this alpha release there is also some restructuring of test profiles that breaks compatibility with existing PTS1/PTS2 test profiles, but all in-tree test profiles have been updated to reflect these changes. There may also be another break again before the final Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 release, but all in-tree/OpenBenchmarking.org test profiles will get the updates freely.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.8.1 (Sep 9, 2010)

  • Just a couple of small bug-fixes since the 2.8 release

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.8.0 (Aug 31, 2010)

  • 134 Test Profiles
  • 56 Test Suites + PCQS
  • New Analytics Capabilities
  • New Installation & External Dependency Management Support
  • Improved Windows 7 x64 Support

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Beta (Aug 4, 2010)

  • pts-core: Report the standard error of test results within the result table
  • pts-core: When the run count is dynamically increased (likely due to std dev being too high), report the std dev to the concise display mode
  • pts-core: Reinstantiate the pts_client display when calling the run or install process so the debug display mode can be loaded if needed
  • pts-core: Drop install-all-dependencies option as running "install-dependencies all" has been the recommended way
  • pts-core: Rewritten PTS External Dependency implementation
  • pts-core: Rewritten PTS test installation code
  • pts-core: Drop PossiblePaths XML tag for test profiles as it is no longer used by any upstream test profiles
  • pts-core: Add "overview graph" to the PTS Results Viewer
  • pts-core: Add LineAfterHint to parse-results.xml interface for indicating a line after the test results line that's wanted
  • pts-core: Add Message tag to test profile XML specification for pairing it with a of a menu option for providing additional information to user
  • pts: Update crafty test profile against Crafty 23.3
  • pts: Update openssl test profile against OpenSSL 1.0.0a and add Windows support
  • pts: Add systester test profile as a new CPU test

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Alpha 2 (Jul 22, 2010)

  • pts-core: Fix recover-run command always reporting the system software has changed, regression from first alpha
  • pts-core: More underlying PTS3 changes
  • pts-core: Add SKIP_EXTERNAL_DEPENDENCIES_CHECK environmental variable for skipping the PTS external dependency checking on test install
  • pts-core: Add rebuild-composite-xml option for rebuilding the composite.xml file in a result file
  • pts-core: Fix parse-results.xml MultiMatch not working from a regression in 2.8a1
  • pts-core: When installing test dependencies, don't confuse the root user if the user is connected to a Phoronix Global account
  • pts-core: No longer rely on passing around $display_mode but utilize pts_client::$display for displaying user I/O
  • phodevi: Nouveau detection improvements for when the X Server isn't running
  • pts: Update vdrift and vdrift-fps-monitor test profiles against VDrift 2010-06-30

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Alpha 1 (Jul 1, 2010)

  • pts-core: Start work on pts_PieChart for generating pie charts
  • pts-core: When installing/running a test, make sure the TEST_ENV_DIR is writable
  • pts-core: Add MultiMatch support to the parse-results.xml interface
  • pts-core: Don't add empty tests to the test execution queue
  • pts-core: Don't delete old test results when running a saved test result identifier and it fails
  • pts-core: Don't report test profiles with a NO_RESULT ResultFormat as having failed to run
  • pts-core: Drop support for parse-results.php/parse-results.sh, now mandate the parse-results.xml interface as its superior
  • pts-core: Add FORCE_MIN_TIMES_TO_RUN environmental variable support
  • pts-core: Attempt to better determine inverted multi-way comparisons
  • pts-core: Validate test installations to run prior to save prompt
  • pts-core: Further tweaking of the PTS Results Viewer
  • pts-core: Drop analyze-linear-tracker command as we now auto-determine whether the result file is a tracker-type test
  • pts-core: Ensure unique color indexes where possible on rendered graph keys
  • pts-core: Lots of internal code changes for PTS3 plans
  • phodevi: When LLVMpipe is being used, support modes below 800 x 600
  • pts: Drop fgl-glxgears, fract, md-gromacs, memory-bandwidth, super-pi test profiles
  • pts: Update mplayer-base with newer MPlayer snapshot and add VA-API support
  • pts: Update video-cpu-usage test profile to use Big Buck Bunny 1080p H.264 sample

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.6.1 (Jun 3, 2010)

  • pts-core: External dependencies support for MeeGo
  • pts-core: Fix for running merge-results command with un-cloned Phoronix Global IDs
  • pts-core: Fix for the system monitoring test library to reflect recent Phodevi sensor API changes
  • pts-core: Fix for crammed values under certain scenarios in pts_Graph
  • pts-core: Support for reporting installed software / hardware statistics
  • pts-core: Fix misaligning some pts_Chart result values when test results are missing for a run
  • pts: Update unigine-heaven test profile to Unigine Heaven 2.1
  • pts: Update unigine-sanctuary test profile to Unigine Sanctuary 2.3
  • pts: Update unigine-tropics test profile to Unigine Tropics 1.3

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.6.0 (May 24, 2010)

  • 134 Test Profiles
  • 56 Test Suites + PCQS
  • New Test Results Parsing Mechanism
  • New PTS Results Viewer Interface
  • Phoromatic / Phoromatic Tracker Improvements
  • Functional Windows 7 x64 Support

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.6.0 Beta 3 (May 14, 2010)

  • pts-core: More PTS Results Viewer improvements
  • pts-core: Support line graphs in charts
  • pts-core: Smarter rendering layout of the pts_Graph keys
  • pts-core: Add copy-run-in-result-file option
  • pts-core: Client tracker improvements
  • pts-core: Auto detection of result identifiers to determine if tracker-type testing and apply optimizations if so
  • phodevi: Rework entire Phodevi sensor API/architecture
  • phodevi: Add support for monitoring the GPU fence count

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.6.0 Beta 1 (Apr 27, 2010)

  • pts-core: Add ResultBeforeString tag to parse-results.xml interface
  • pts-core: When a filesize is not supplied by downloads.xml, try to calculate it using filesize() if applicable
  • pts-core: Don't bold the pts_Chart results "winners" when there is only one test run
  • pts-core: New PTS Results Viewer interface
  • pts-core: Add generated section to PTS result file XML
  • pts-core: Many PhoroScript interpreter improvements
  • pts-core: Add run-tests-in-suite option for running tests in a suite, but using user-defined settings
  • pts-core: Remove install-all and force-install-all options as they have been deprecated since PTS 1.6, use the "all" virtual suite instead
  • pts-core: Fix when running the same test identifier for a result file multiple times and its test log dir has rename problem
  • pts-core: Add GRAPH_HIGHLIGHT environmental variable for highlighting specific test results when rendering a graph (initially for bar graphs)
  • pts-core: Add total_testing_time to the core storage that keeps track of how much time the given system spends benchmarking forever
  • phodevi: Improve system thermal monitoring sysfs nodes on Linux
  • phodevi: Improve Clang/LLVM compiler detection
  • phodevi: Add DEFAULT_VIDEO_MODE environmental variable
  • pts: Add compiler suite
  • pts: Update crafty test profile against Crafty 23.2
  • pts: Update smokin-guns test profile against Smokin' Guns 1.1 Beta 4
  • pts: Start porting over numerous test profiles to offer Windows 7 x64 compatibility

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 3 (Apr 12, 2010)

  • pts-core: If the NO_MD5_CHECKS environmental variable is set, don't perform MD5 file checks on test installation
  • pts-core: Don't install the linux-32bit-libraries external dependency by default on 64-bit Linux systems
  • pts-core: Fix length of download text progress indicator
  • pts-core: Fix regression that caused the merge-results option not to work
  • -pts-core: Graphing tweaks
  • pts-core: Add suite-to-pdf option
  • pts-core: Restore compatibility for the Phoronix Test Suite on PHP 5.1 and early PHP 5.2 versions
  • pts-core: Installation error string improvements
  • pts-core: Run-time string improvements
  • pts-core: Rework environmental variables handling
  • pts-core: Various fixes
  • phodevi: Fix causing a segmentation fault on some Mesa systems
  • pts: Update unigine-heaven test profile against Unigine Heaven 2.0
  • pts: Update openssl test profile against OpenSSL 1.0.0 upstream

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 2 (Mar 21, 2010)

  • pts-core: Add /tmp/phoronix-test-suite.active lock
  • pts-core: Move module define statements out to using the PTS definitions XML
  • pts-core: Optimizations for Phoromatic Tracker
  • pts-core: New module settings configuration store
  • pts-core: Add support for passing PTS module setup options via an environmental variable to PTS_MODULE_SETUP
  • pts-core: Expand the capabilities of the parse-results.xml interface
  • pts-core: Add image quality comparison support to the parse-results.xml interface
  • pts-core: Add support for harmonic means for Phoromatic Tracker
  • pts-core: Consolidate pts_Graph configuration setup
  • pts-core: Consolidate user configuration setup
  • pts-core: Rewrite and make working pts_Chart
  • pts-core: Add more files/commands to log for the system logs
  • pts-core: Faster, more efficient rendering of graphs
  • phoromatic: When setting up the Phoromatic module, allow the system description to be inputted and then sent to the Phoromatic Server
  • phodevi: Support for Clang compiler
  • phodevi: Quirk handling for PCLinuxOS as it doesn't know how to properly identify itself
  • phodevi: Support for reading the default and current GPU/memory frequencies with ATI Radeon KMS power management on Linux
  • phodevi: Update system memory sensor
  • pts: Add xplane9-iqc test profile for image quality comparison tests on X-Plane 9
  • pts: Drop compliance-ogl test profile

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 1 (Mar 10, 2010)

  • pts-core: No longer statically code define statements for XML parsing, move into pts-core/definitions XML statements
  • pts-core: Add EST_TIME_REMAINING variable assignment that has the estimated run-time remaining during testing
  • pts-core: Add RequiresCoreVersion tag to XML test suite specification similar to the test profile implementation
  • pts-core: Don't run graphics tests if the driver configuration is known to not support 3D acceleration at all
  • pts-core: Temporarily drop support for PTS weighted suites until it is rearchitected
  • pts-core: Add new interface (parse-results.xml) for handling results parsing of tests using an XML file with a result template
  • pts-core: Add ProfileVersion tag to XML result file specification
  • pts-core: Add some of the Phoromatic Tracker helper scripts
  • phodevi: Add support for detecting Reiser4 file-system via its super magic block
  • phodevi: Report hard drive manufacturer when detected and prepend to the model string
  • phodevi: Add initial audio / sound card detection support
  • phoromatic: Add support for powering off the system if told to do so by the Phoromatic server
  • phoromatic: Add support for restarting the system if told to do so by the Phoromatic server
  • phoromatic: Wait an additional 90 seconds on connectivity problems
  • phoromatic: Report estimated time remaining to test completion to Phoromatic server
  • phoromatic: Add client support for the Phoromatic trigger interface
  • phoromatic: Support for reading the Phoromatic server build/version
  • bilde_renderer: Fix the SVG renderer back-end from battling multiple graph style values contained in a single page
  • pts_Graph: Line graphing improvements for Phoromatic Tracker
  • pts-core: Various fixes and improvements
  • pts: Add adjustable record / block size to iozone test profile
  • pts: Remove dead download links
  • pts: Update openarena test profile against OpenArena 0.8.5 patch
  • pts: Update xplane9 test profile against XPlane 9.45 timedemo

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.4.1 (Feb 18, 2010)

  • pts-core: Pass PTS result objects directly to pts_Graph
  • pts-core: Add WatermarkURL option to graph-config.xml
  • pts-core: Drop support for the PTS_USE_OLD_DOWNLOAD_CODE override for using the old networking code
  • pts-core: Faster merging of test results and pair similar tests together
  • pts-core: When network support is down, don't prompt to upload results to Phoronix Global
  • pts-core: When user fails to agree to the first-run user-agreement, don't bother asking about anonymous usage reporting
  • phoromatic: Add phoromatic.clone-results option for cloning test results from a Phoromatic repository, when the clone option is enabled from the server side
  • phoromatic: Add phoromatic.system-schedule option for seeing the system's test schedule from the Phoromatic server
  • phoromatic: Add phoromatic.system-schedule-today option for seeing the system's test schedule for today from the Phoromatic server
  • phoromatic: Add phoromatic.send-message option to send any bits of information to the Phoromatic Server to list in the system warning area for that system
  • phoromatic: Support for uploading test and system logs to Phoromatic server
  • bilde_renderer: Add initial interactivity support for on-click events with some drawing elements
  • toggle_screensaver: Properly stop and start the screensaver using qdbus on KDE4
  • pts_BarGraph: Report standard deviation on test results when hovering over a bar with a supported renderer
  • pts_LineGraph: Add switch with new path for handling many identifiers in different way
  • pts_LineGraph: Add last values to line graph display
  • pts: Drop MD5 hashes in the wine-* humus tests
  • pts: Various small fixes
  • pts: Don't use parallel make jobs with encode-mp3 test profile due to Moblin build problems

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.4.0 (Feb 2, 2010)

  • pts-core: Report to test notes area of PTS test results if the system was using eCryptfs
  • pts-core: Fix GTK2 GUI bug of multiple instances of the GTK2 GUI test run-time window being shown
  • pts-core: Support passing multiple tests/suites to download-test-files option
  • pts-core: Allow arguments to be passed and used by the build-suite option for specifying tests/suites
  • pts-core: Fix a bug that caused the basic display mode to be used on Anzhofen
  • pts-core: Add task-cache-reference-comparison-xml option for more easily building caches on Anzhofen
  • phodevi: Workaround for Radeon KMS not reporting all available modes when connected to a 2560 x 1600 panel
  • pts_LineGraph: When there becomes too many point identifiers to be plot (such as with Phoromatic Tracker), only plot every so often
  • phoromatic: Allow unscheduled test results to be uploaded to Phoromatic server, if the settings enable it
  • pts: Add pts-desktop-live suite for Anzhofen
  • pts: Add pts-netbook-live suite for Anzhofen Netbook
  • pts: Update out of date download links within test profiles
  • pts: Update page size for iozone per input from Oracle

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.2.0 (Nov 16, 2009)

  • pts-core: Various code path optimizations and cleaning
  • pts-core: Add dump-system-sensors option to display a readout of all supported Phodevi sensors and their values and print unsupported sensors
  • pts-core: Fix TEST_RESULTS_NAME environmental variable not working
  • pts-core: Fix network-setup network testing check actually use the proxy, hook in the HTTP proxy override properly
  • pts-core: Clean-up download cache directories code
  • pts-core: Add "installed-tests" virtual suite of tests that are currently installed
  • pts-core: On GTK2 GUI Don't show buttons/header for reference system comparisons for results when there are actually no results to compare
  • pts-core: Small OpenSolaris 2010.02 support updates
  • pts-core: Various small bug fixes
  • phodevi: Support for the GPU fan-speed sensor with ATI graphics driver
  • phodevi: Add support for reading the stock GPU engine/memory clock when using the open-source Radeon driver
  • phodevi: Fixed detection of the xf86-video-radeonhd display driver
  • phodevi: Fix throwing SUSE Linux 11.2 into an infinite loop when running "X -version" on this OS, "Xorg -version" works fine instead
  • pts: Update darwin test suite
  • pts: Support using zypper to install external dependencies on SuSE/OpenSuSE since it can ignore missing / removed packages without failing
  • documentation: Update documentation for Phoronix Test Suite 2.2

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.0.0 (Aug 4, 2009)

  • pts-core: Don't prompt for download mirror selection if the option is enabled, but running from the GUI
  • pts-core: Don't report "Comparison" multiple times when using the reference-comparison option
  • phodevi: Add LXDE desktop environment detection
  • pts: Add two more reference comparison systems
  • pts: minion test profile updates
  • pts: Update workstation-graphics test suite

New in Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Beta 4 (Jul 28, 2009)

  • pts-core: For the "all" virtual suite, don't include tests that have a ResultFormat of NO_RESULT, PASS_FAIL, or MULTI_PASS_FAIL
  • pts-core: Clean-up pts_test_file_download object
  • pts-core: For GTK2 GUI change around event reporting for test installation
  • pts-core: Don't require trailing slash for user-config.xml paths
  • pts-core: Properly handle test profiles with no files to be downloaded in pts_test_download_files_locally_available()
  • pts-core: When using run-test in a batch mode and automated mode, but batch-setup hasn't been run, don't output an error
  • pts-core: Few fixes for Phoronix Global comparisons from GTK2 GUI interface
  • pts-core: Don't list test results when they are just the reference system comparison IDs from Phoronix Global
  • phodevi: Fix regression that caused system and CPU temperatures to not be reported through LM_Sensors interface
  • phodevi: Don't report disk size on hard disk identifier string when size equals 1GB, since that would be due to incorrect size
  • pts: Fix prey test profile bug in key location detection for key test profile by using $DEBUG_REAL_HOME in test install script
  • pts: Update boost packages for ubuntu-packages.xml external dependencies
  • pts: For vdrift test profile, don't grab the mouse
  • pts: Add glut as an external dependency to supertuxkart test profile
  • pts: Update compress-pbzip2 test profile to use 256MB compression file
  • documentation: Add Frequently Asked Questions
  • documentation: Add PTS Desktop Live
  • documentation: Few small updates

New in Phoronix Test Suite 1.8.0 (Apr 6, 2009)

  • pts-core: Only emit a warning when the inputted test result file is associated with a different test/suite
  • pts-core: Add AA/AF reporting to sub-titles on graphics for Graphics tests where levels are forced by driver
  • pts-core: More robust detection of clock frequencies with ATI OverDrive
  • pts-core: Fix a few PHP warnings
  • pts-core: Fix regression in excess removal of spaces from strings in pts_trim_spaces()
  • pts-core: Revise the installation interface for GTK2 GUI
  • pts: Add favorites test suite
  • pts: Allow c-ray test profile to have millisecond precision for test results
  • pts: Update nexuiz test profile to Nexuiz 2.5.0
  • pts_Graph: Add support for multiple sub-titles on graphs
  • bilde_renderer: Support for using system default TTF fonts
  • documentation: Update for Phoronix Test Suite 1.8

New in Phoronix Test Suite 1.6.0 (Jan 20, 2009)

  • pts-core: Add support for installing and running virtual suites
  • pts-core: Add hardware subsystem and "all" virtual suites
  • pts-core: Provide symlink for Xauthority instead of copy
  • pts-core: Deprecate install-all and force-install-all commands to be replaced by "install all" and "force-install all"
  • pts-core: Add results overview table to result-file-to-pdf generator
  • pts-core: Move graph generating code to pts_generate_graphs()
  • pts-core: Fix for downloading files from remote download-cache directories
  • pts-core: Support preset assignments through pts_run_option_next()
  • pts-core: Setup batch-benchmark, batch-run, default-run, default-benchmark to use option interface with new preset assignment capabilities
  • pts-core: Move all of the command / option handler into pts-core from phoronix-test-suite shell script and add option-command-aliases
  • pts-core: Eliminate use of COMMAND assignment
  • pts-core: Eliminate command descriptor from PTS run option API
  • pts-core: Move list of options on command failure out of phoronix-test-suite and into pts-core
  • pts-core: Fix round to calculation in pts_format_time_string()
  • pts-core: Add SymLinkFilesFromCache option to user-config.xml for linking files from download-cache instead of copy
  • pts-core: Improve GPU detection for some X Server / GPU configurations
  • pts-core: Add pts_swap_variables() for performing variable swaps
  • pts: Documentation updates
  • pts: Resolution fix for smokin-guns test profile
  • pts: Add Pardus external dependencies support
  • pts: Add linux-system test suite
  • pts_Graph: Switch font calculation to using bilde_renderer::soft_text_string_dimensions()
  • pts_Graph: Switch to using new infrastructure in bilde_renderer
  • pts_Graph: Don't print market for tick when display value is 0
  • system_monitor: Fix for handling file extension through bilde_renderer
  • bilde_renderer: Add bilde_renderer::setup_renderer()
  • bilde_renderer: Add internal text/font width and height calculator
  • bilde_swf_renderer: Render rectangles, borders, and right-aligned text correctly

New in Phoronix Test Suite 1.6.0 Beta 2 (Jan 2, 2009)

  • pts-core: Improve size detection of low-capacity hard disks
  • pts-core: Improve lspci support for distributions using /sbin/lspci (such as OpenSuSE)
  • pts-core: Move base test profiles and resources to pts/base-test-profiles/ and pts/base-test-resources/
  • pts-core: Improve motherboard southbridge detection for some Intel ICH Chipsets
  • pts-core: Add pts_test_installed() boolean function
  • pts-core: Add pts_installed_test_tandem_XmlReader object
  • pts-core: Clean up Display / X.Org server reported string
  • pts-core: Eliminate use of most preg_ functions
  • pts-core: Archive installation output of tests in the test's directory in file install.log
  • pts-core: Add install-all-dependencies option to install all available external dependencies for that distribution
  • pts-core: When installing or running a test, only print to standard output if under 10KB
  • pts-core: Rewrite pts_remove() function
  • pts-core: Allow reading CPU usage percent from individual cores
  • pts-core: Cache reading of hw_cpu_core_count() since that shouldn't change while pts-core is running
  • pts-core: Add auto-removable-media field to auto test options support
  • pts: Add UXA acceleration check to GtkPerf test note reporting
  • pts: Add 2d-test base profile that reports 2D acceleration mode using Cascading Test Profiles
  • pts: Add build-mysql test profile for timed build of MySQL 5.1
  • pts: Add system-disk test suite for real world disk / encryption tests
  • pts: Add libperl-dev to Ubuntu External Dependencies XML to perl package
  • pts: Add photo-sample base test profile for providing sample photographs
  • pts: Add graphics-magick test profile for GraphicsMagick 1.3 image testing
  • pts: Add graphics-magick to multicore test suite due to its use of OpenMP
  • pts: Update lzma download link for compress-lzma test profile
  • pts: Adjust more test profiles from using $argv to $LOG_FILE
  • pts: Update and fix specviewperf10 test profile
  • pts: Update wine-unstable test profile to WINE v1.1.12
  • pts_Graph: Tweak formatting of basic graph attributes
  • pts_Graph: When rendering a graph on a percent basis, format scale for 100-point basis
  • pts_Graph: Add more stock colors to painter
  • bilde_renderer: Add and implement draw_polygon and draw_ellipse to drawing API
  • bilde_renderer: When setting the image quality level to use with the render_image() function, base it on a 100-point scale
  • bilde_renderer: Add support for dynamically resizing the image drawing buffer
  • bilde_renderer: Add experimental Adobe Flash / SWF renderer
  • bilde_renderer: Add a generic abstract GD library renderer and then have bilde_png_renderer extend that
  • bilde_renderer: Add a JPEG renderer using the GD library
  • system_monitor: When monitoring CPU usage, monitor the usage on each individual core (and still overall too)

New in Phoronix Test Suite 1.6.0 Alpha 3 (Dec 11, 2008)

  • The biggest change in Phoronix Test Suite 1.6.0 Alpha 3 is now the capability to specify multiple arguments when using the install, force-install, run, and benchmark commands. It's possible to run a command like phoronix-test-suite benchmark encode-ogg openssl, which would install and then benchmark both the Ogg encoding and OpenSSL tests and archive the results in the same saved results file. Users can specify as many tests as they would like and you can even specify multiple suites and Phoronix Global IDs or use any combination of them. This is a feature that has long been sought after by users, and it's finally here.
  • Two new commands worth noting in this release are default-run and default-benchmark, which is similar to the run and benchmark commands, respectively, but instead will create a "virtual suite" out of the specified test(s). An optional DefaultEntry XML tag has been added to the test specification that allows sane defaults to be specified within the test file and then dynamically turned into a suite. If the DefaultEntry tag isn't set, the options to use (if relevant to the test) will be automatically determined by pts-core. Most users though won't need to become familiar with these commands with the current test and suite options already being sufficient in most test environments.
  • The results viewer for the Phoronix Test Suite has picked up an overview chart / table that's displayed at the top. This XSL-driven table shows the results from all tests and all runs in a very concise manner. From there, the user can click on one of the results to immediately jump to that graph for a more detailed analysis.
  • The third alpha release for Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 "Tydal" adds in two new test profiles: prey and jxrendermark. JXRenderMark is a new test developed by Clemens Eisserer that does quite a nice job at testing out the X Render extension and the underlying driver. The test profile covering Prey is for the retail game as its demo doesn't allow running in a timed-demo mode.
  • A number of regression fixes and other technical improvements. Affecting users are a few option names have been changed, so be sure to check-out the included documentation for the latest commands. In an earlier alpha support for reading the desktop environment was added in this release there should be improved Xfce desktop detection. For those interested in the PTS suites, this release adds in a basic file-system test suite (named filesystem). Of technical note in this release is eliminating the use of statically coding all Phoronix Test Suite commands into the shell interface, but now most of that is dynamically driven.

New in Phoronix Test Suite 1.4.2 (Nov 19, 2008)

  • pts-core: Fix bug in xorg_ddx_driver_info() that could have caused some driver versions to be misreported
  • pts-core: Fix for possible regression (depending upon DRI driver) in IS_*_GRAPHICS setup
  • pts-core: Temperature reporting fix in graphics_processor_temperature() that made it look like sometimes there was no sensor
  • pts-core: Add "00" to HAL $remove_words
  • pts-core: Add "none" to HAL $remove_words
  • pts: Fix openal-development external dependency for ubuntu-packages.xml due to package name change in Ubuntu 8.10
  • pts: Set file size to 256MB with compress-lzma test profile

New in Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 (Nov 3, 2008)

  • pts-core: Improve RAM model/speed/type identification
  • pts-core: Fix showing Phoronix Global URLs in browser (reported by Marox)
  • pts-core: Add Tracker (trackerd) to $check_processes
  • pts-core: Add support for checking if SELinux is enabled/running
  • pts-core: Improve reporting of system RAM information when not all DMI data is present
  • pts-core: Add -L argument to curl to follow download links
  • pts-core: Add support in read_osx_system_profiler() to read multiple objects
  • pts-core: Add support for reading detailed RAM information on Mac OS X
  • pts-core: Add support for reading detailed RAM information on OpenSolaris using DMI
  • pts-core: Fix bug that caused installation of multiple Cascading Test Profiles to only go one level deep
  • pts-core: Rework code to pts_hw_string() and pts_sw_string()
  • pts-core: Add timed kill infrastructure to kill a process from a test script by calling $TIMED_KILL
  • pts: Switch tandem-xml test profile to using $PHP_BIN instead of calling php (thus allows it to run where PHP isn't part of their path, such as Solaris)
  • pts: Switch pts-graph test profile to using $PHP_BIN instead of calling php (thus allows it to run where PHP isn't part of their path, such as Solaris)
  • pts: Add additional run-time tests for x11perf test profile
  • pts: Update insertion count to 12,500 for sqlite test profile
  • pts: Update unigine-tropics test profile against Tropics 1.1 from Unigine Corp
  • pts: Update unigine-sanctuary test profile against Sanctuary 2.1 from Unigine Corp
  • pts: Drop test profile named wine for running WINE git code since it looks like it's never used anymore and poorly named
  • pts: Add wine-unstable base test profile that provides WINE 1.1.7
  • pts: Add wine-humus-tests base test profile that extends wine-unstable and provides functionality for Humus.name tests
  • pts: Add wine-vf2 test for a WINE-driven OpenGL Volumetric Fogging test
  • pts: Add wine-cloth test that uses WINE
  • pts: Add wine-domino test that uses WINE
  • pts: Add wine-fire2 test that uses WINE
  • pts: Add wine-hdr test that uses WINE
  • pts: Add wine-metaballs test that uses WINE
  • pts: Add wine-water test that uses WINE
  • pts: Add wine-graphics test suite that contains all WINE graphics tests
  • pts: Drop system-memory test suite since it's basically the same as the memory test suite
  • pts_Graph: Support resizing the font size in write_text_center() if it's too large to fit within the bounding box
  • pts: Add Qt4 development files to external dependencies through qt4-development generic name
  • pts: Ensure all *-devel generic names are now named *-development
  • pts: Add qgears2 test profile for a Qt graphics test that can test XRender and OpenGL
  • pts: Add xrender test suite for tests that use the X11 RENDER extension
  • update_checker: Fix version recognition / comparison
  • documentation: Bring all documentation up-to-date with Orkdal

New in Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 (Sep 3, 2008)

  • pts-core: Fix for DEBUG_FILE not being detected
  • pts-core: Fix missing variable in list-saved-results (Thanks to Michael Ploujnikov)
  • pts-core: Fix for calls using explode() directly into an array_pop()
  • pts-core: Add a few more remove_words in the HAL extraction to check for
  • pts-core: Add fallback support for read_hal() when the names are specified in an array and the earlier names can't be found with the proper information
  • pts-core: More improved motherboard detection support
  • pts-core: Add SupportedPlatforms tag for optionally specifying on what operating systems this test is compatible with (Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD)
  • pts-core: Allow read_pci() to accept an array for fallback devices to read
  • pts-core: The read_pci() tags don't need to be postfixed with a colon any longer
  • pts-core: Improved chipset / Northbridge detection
  • pts-core: Don't emit errors in pts_extended_init() if making the download cache directory failed due to read only file-system if specified
  • pts-core: pts_module_processes() contains an array of all supported module processes
  • pts-core: Fix regression that caused pts_process_remove() to run when checking a process status using pts_process_active()
  • pts-core: Suppress warnings/errors from set_nvidia_extension()
  • pts-core: On some Intel setups, don't report DRI in graphics string
  • pts-core: Improve Intel graphics memory detection and other drivers that report the capacity as VideoRam instead of VideoRAM
  • pts-core: Create end-user variables for having software/hardware values when saving the results and setting the test identifier
  • pts-core: ~/.phoronix-test-suite/local/ -> ~/.phoronix-test-suite/module-files/ for files used or generated by PTS modules
  • pts-core: If running a test suite and some tests failed to install (such as not being supported by the architecture), continue to let the test suite run with the tests that are installed when using the benchmark or batch-benchmark option instead of exiting.
  • pts-core: Write the PTS version to the last run version upon exiting in the Phoronix Test Suite user-config.xml file
  • pts-core: Add user variable support for the saved results file name
  • pts: Update mandrivalinux-packages.xml from Stéphane Téletchéa
  • pts: Add the unigine test suite for OpenGL tech demo tests from Unigine Corp
  • pts: Fix tests in java-opengl test suite
  • pts: Add ppracer test profile for Planet Penguin Racer
  • pts: Add unigine-tropics test profile for new Unigine Tropics technology demo
  • graphics_override: Don't apply anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering settings unless there is something to apply
  • pts_MultiPassFailGraph: Ensure the background fill reaches the bottom edge of the box
  • documentation: Update the test profile and suite XML specifications
  • documentation: Bring the documentation up to date for PTS 1.2 Malvik