A Huge Update To Test: The Phoronix Test Suite With Behind-The-Firewall Phoromatic

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix Test Suite on 6 October 2014 at 12:00 PM EDT. Add A Comment
PHORONIX TEST SUITE
For those not following the Phoronix Test Suite GitHub, there's been a ton of commits recently with some major additions to hugely benefit enterprise users and those running the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic at scale.

Available today is the second development release of PTS 5.4, the Phoronix Test Suite 5.4-Lipki Milestone 2 release. The big work happening with the upstream Phoronix Test Suite code is that thanks to continued engineering engagements, the Phoromatic code built into the phoronix-test-suite code-base since PTS 5.2 is receiving a ton of work and is becoming full-featured -- complete with support for decentralized, behind-the-firewall operations from OpenBenchmarking.org so you can setup your own complete deployment within networks restricted from common Internet access. All of the new Phoromatic code is being open-source and no longer need any enterprise licensing but is now being driven by custom engineering engagements and commercial support: if you need support or other services to Phoronix Test Suite / Phoromatic / OpenBenchmarking.org, contact us.

So with the Phoronix Test Suite 5.4 Milestone 2 release that comes one month after 5.4 Milestone 1, the notable work is aplenty and includes:

- Optional Avahi zero-conf network discovery support so the Phoromatic Server can advertise itself automatically on the LAN with automatic detection by the Phoronix Test Suite clients.

- Support for Phoromatic Servers to automatically serve their test file download-cache and OpenBenchmarking.org meta-data cache so Phoromatic / Phoronix Test Suite can operate entirely behind a firewall / LAN without Internet access. As long as all of the necessary files are cached by the Phoromatic Server, with the new improvements they'll automatically propagate to the Phoronix Test Suite clients when needed.

- Support for Phoronix Test Suite clients to operate without any need to connect to OpenBenchmarking.org when connected to a Phoromatic Server in an enterprise deployment.

- Upstart and systemd service files for running daemon'ized versions of the Phoromatic Server and Phoronix Test Suite Phoromatic Client (still a work in progress).

- Support for open-source Phoromatic Servers to store all test result data locally without having to rely upon OpenBenchmarking.org infrastructure.

- Rewritten RPM package generator support for the phoronix-test-suite package for RHEL/Fedora/CentOS/Scientific.

- More concise NoNetworkCommunication and NoInternetCommunication options within the ~/.phoronix-test-suite/user-config.xml.

- Various result file parsing improvements.

- Improvements to the phoronix-test-suite make-download-cache sub-command.

- New phoronix-test-suite make-openbenchmarking-cache and phoronix-test-suite phoromatic.explore sub-commands.

- Improvements to the Phoromatic Server web interface (still a work in progress).

- A PhoromaticServers option within the ~/.phoronix-test-suite/user-config.xml file for specifying non-auto-detected Phoromatic Servers.

- A new MONITOR_INTERVAL environment variable is supported by the system monitor module for specifying the time (in seconds) between polling sensors.

- Phodevi has also received a ton of improvements include better GPU frequency detection support when no X.Org Server is running on Linux, virtual file-system improvements, X Server log reading via systemd's journalctl, improved /etc/os-release parsing, etc.

- Various bug-fixes.

This is a heck of a lot of work that wound up into Phoronix Test Suite 5.4 Milestone 2 and the PTS 5.4 release isn't even being close to over! I'm planning to have Phoronix Test Suite 5.4 with the overhauled Phoromatic ready to ship in November and before that are even more exciting changes to come on the PTS/Phoromatic front! There's also the start of new Phoromatic documentation to cover the client/server changes and you can find the updated documentation via this directory.

You can download Phoronix Test Suite 5.4 Milestone 2 via Phoronix-Test-Suite.com but I'd encourage all testers to be running the latest Phoronix Test Suite Git at the time of testing as there will be major changes and features landing in Git almost daily for the next few weeks. Phoronix Test Suite 5.4 is going to be one of the biggest releases in quite some time for our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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