Phoronix Test Suite 4.6.0 "Utsira" Released

Phoronix Test Suite 4.6.0 (codenamed "Utsira") has been officially released today with compiler improvements, support for the HHVM virtual machine, BSD support improvements, and other hardware/software improvements.

Serving as the major Q2'2013 update to our open-source cross-platform benchmarking software is Phoronix Test Suite 4.6-Utsira. Phoronix Test Suite 4.6 isn't the most exciting quarterly update, but it still carries a fair amount of weight and some interesting improvements prior to Intel's Haswell launch and other forthcoming x86/ARM hardware launches at Computex, etc.

As covered in a development article, 4.6-Utsira is now officially compatible with Facebook's HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM). The open-source HHVM software is an open-source CLI and server replacement to the official PHP implementation. As benchmarks have shown, the HipHop virtual machine can be incredibly fast and much better than modern PHP releases depending upon the workload. Now if you happen to have HHVM installed, the Phoronix Test Suite can detect it and support using it in place of PHP, while both implementations are fully supported.

As noted in the same article, there's also now a internal-run sub-command that is similar to a pre-seeded Phoronix Test Suite batch command, which will seed the benchmarking setup by saving the results but without prompting to upload the results to OpenBenchmarking.org. Configuring the batch mode via the batch-setup options is the recommended method for enterprises and those professionals using the Phoronix Test Suite and not wishing to publicly share the data on our collaborative platform, but the internal-run sub-command is a new and easy alternative.

When it comes to Phodevi, the Phoronix Device Interface, there's various improvements like better DIMM memory module detection on Apple OS X, Intel GPU overclocking detection under Linux, some BSD improvements, and in wake of the new Intel P-State CPU driver there is now support for detecting the CPU frequency scaling driver (there's already been support for reporting the CPU frequency scaling governor, but with now P-State being an alternative to ACPI CPUfreq, the driver is being reported too).

The Phoronix Test Suite 4.6 release also has some compiler making improvements for better detecting some used CPU compiler flags on the test profiles being built from source, building upon earlier work. Those details were covered in the Utsira milestone two announcement.

On the BSD side, there's been benchmarking and proper certification along with some bug-fixes done for DragonFlyBSD 3.4. The PC-BSD/FreeBSD state remains in great shape for the Phoronix Test Suite and I'm still in the process of testing OpenBSD 5.3 and making any needed improvements there.

For more details on Phoronix Test Suite 4.6 and all of the exposed benchmarking capabilities and other automated testing options exposed by this open-source (GPL) software for running on Linux, OS X, BSD, Solaris, and Windows operating systems, please refer to the updated PDF documentation. More details and to download this software, visit Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.

For those interested in commercial support, custom engineering contracts, or to offer support to this industry-leading open-source benchmarking software, please contact us. Next month will mark the five year anniversary of the public version of the Phoronix Test Suite that was born out of the benchmarking scripts I originally developed for Phoronix.com product reviews and benchmarking in conjunction with leading tier-one IHVs and ISVs.

Community support, feature requests, and other discussions about Phoronix Test Suite 4.6 can be directed to the forums.

For the Q3/late-summer release, Utsira will be succeeded by Phoronix Test Suite 4.8-Sokndal. Depending upon feedback on the Phoronix Test Suite 4.6.0 release, a 4.6.1 point release may come in June. Happy benchmarking!