New Daily, Per-Commit Testing Of Mesa, Kernel, Compilers

New daily and per-commit testing will commence for the mainline Linux kernel, the Intel Mesa driver, and LLVM/Clang (and possibly GCC) compilers. Similar to past performance "trackers" this will lead to more timely spotting of performance regressions affecting real-world workloads.

In the past Phoronix Media has sponsored public benchmarking test farms to monitor the Linux kernel performance (and its one month update from early 2010) and as well for the daily packages going into tracking Ubuntu and Fedora's performance.

The kernel tracker had provided the daily Linux kernel performance for over one year and was successful in finding major performance regressions. Those public performance trackers that were powered by our in-house Phoromatic software that automatically schedules and controls the use of the Phoronix Test Suite within enterprise environments.

Those public trackers were halted as they basically proved their purpose in being able to track the daily performance of key open-source projects. Additionally, they were stopped due to the associated costs of running such machines constantly with very little ROI on the these public trackers and due to much of the development and Phoronix.com work being mostly a one-man operation; it added to my already suffocated schedule when there would be a kernel panic or other issues that required manual intervention.

Fast-forward three years, the Phoronix Test Suite has picked up an enormous number of features with continuing to deliver major releases on a quarterly basis, Phoromatic continues to receive work on various enterprise options for testing, and OpenBenchmarking.org continues to lead for being the resource to facilitate collaborative benchmarking, side-by-side performance analysis, and other features not found by any other benchmarking system open-source or not.

There's already new great work to show, but in the coming months there's also the very exciting Phoronix Test Suite 5.0 release with many new features to be added plus a planned overhaul of OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoromatic running atop that immersive platform. In other words, it's time to start some more public trackers for showing off the very latest work and capabilities of our automated Linux benchmarking system.

Besides new features on our end, hardware like Intel's latest and very energy efficient Haswell processors are making these always-running tracker PCs more economical while delivering exciting performance results, the overall upstream stability of Git for the Linux kernel and Mesa continues to improve and be more reliable, and there's more exciting times ahead where the real-world Linux performance is ever more important with projects like SteamOS and Wayland.

Over the next month or so at Phoronix we will be making public: daily benchmarks (again) of the mainline Linux kernel as found in its Git state, per-commit benchmarks of Mesa when using Intel "Haswell" HD Graphics, various compiler benchmarking instances on a per-commit or daily process, and possibly some other performance monitors too.

We certainly welcome and appreciate your feedback on these plans via our forums with the comment link below or by contacting us. We're happy to engage with new open-source projects for public testing and we also offer Phoromatic/OpenBenchmarking.org for private "behind the firewall" testing for enterprise organizations and various professional / custom engineering services. We're happy to work with you to meet your automated testing and benchmarking needs whether you're an open-source project or commercial organization.