Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 "Lyngen" Alpha 2

I don't generally like to push out software updates over the weekend, but this morning when looking at the patch from 2.6 Alpha 1 (that was released 11 days ago) to the current Git master, it amounts to about 10,500 lines / 400kb. There's really not a lot of code reorganization or other trivial changes, so we are overdue for a new alpha release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.6, a.k.a. Lyngen.

With that said, Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 2 delivers many Phoromatic-related enhancements (some of which are visible through the new Ubuntu Tracker), a new module settings engine (with compatibility for module configuration stores from earlier releases of the Phoronix Test Suite), new capabilities for the XML-based results parsing interface that was introduced early in the Lyngen development cycle (including IQC support), support for generating harmonic means on test results, a brand new and more feature-rich overview chart for the PTS Results Viewer (visible also from the Phoromatic Trackers), graphing (pts_Graph) advancements, improvements to the different bilde_renderer back-ends, Phodevi now detects LLVM's Clang compiler, and ATI Radeon KMS clock reading through radeon_pm_info. There's also various other underlying pts-core changes, some of which is in preparation for Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 changes arriving later this year.

When it comes to the test profiles, there is now a xplane9-iqc test profile for conducting image quality comparisons with the multi-platform X-Plane 9 flight simulator via the PTS IQC support. More test profiles are also now taking advantage of the new results parsing interface and its XML elements.

This is also a good time to flag Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 2 as greater Windows support is imminent and most of that code should land with the next Lyngen Alpha 3 release. We are also still looking for new Phoromatic Tracker ideas of packages to track, such as the evolving performance of Wine or Mesa.

Download the latest stable and development releases of the Phoronix Test Suite at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com. As always, we invite all feedback and feature suggestions. Those looking for enterprise support or custom services can contact PTS Commercial.

Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 2
March 20, 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