Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 M2 Adds New Phoromatic Functionality

The second development release for Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 is now available. This release continues to focus on improving the quality and feature-set provided for the open-source Phoromatic Server component.

Since its overhaul in Phoronix Test Suite 5.4, Phoromatic continues to be a key focal point for development and is being adopted by various organizations for facilitating test management of clusters/groups of systems all from a centralized test interface. With a major conglomerate beginning to roll out their production Phoromatic-based deployment across what is going to be hundreds of systems, a lot of improvements have been going into Phoromatic to make it ready and on-par with our feature-loaded Phoronix Test Suite client. Phoromatic is also what powers the LinuxBenchmarking.com test farm.

There's way too many additions and changes to concisely note in this article so I'd just recommend anyone remotely interested in this feature to check it out themselves: simply run phoronix-test-suite start-phoromatic-server to get going... See the documentation for more details.

Here's the official change-log for Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 Milestone 2:

Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 Milestone 2
4 February 2015

- pts-core: Various fixes
- pts-core: Deb/RPM build packaging improvements.
- pts-core: Add Markdown Readme file
- pts-core: Add hidden ?seed_accountid= option to the welcome / account creation page for custom 6 character ID
- pts-core: Fix for session save path on Fedora when running as normal user
- pts-core: Import copy of FPDF locally for PDF rendering
- phoromatic: Add a public view of test results by going to result page entry -> Result Export -> Public Viewer
- phoromatic: Add basic "Upload To OpenBenchmarking.org" link from test result page
- phoromatic: Allow users to reset their own password by navigating to the settings page
- phoromatic: Add "group name" concept to Phoromatic group of accounts
- phoromatic: Improved formatting of the public-viewer page
- phoromatic: Allow downloading results as PDF
- phoromatic: Allow disabling new account registration by setting custom string via rootadmin's config page
- phoromatic: Allow setting a main page message string to show users once logging into their account, via rootadmin's config page
- phoromatic: Don't show idling systems on the dashboard
- phoromatic: Add IP ping test to system claim page
- phoromatic: Introduce PPRID structure as universal unique identifier for results between accounts
- phoromatic: Allow optional result sharing between groups / unique accounts (controlled via settings)
- phoromatic: Add "force result sharing" option to rootadmin to override per-account settings
- phoromatic: New result compare functionality
- phoromatic: Support for limiting results to a certain time period
- phoromatic: Add comparable results listing on individual result pages
- phoromatic: Register module-discovered Phoromatic Servers with pts-core
- phoromatic: Add "Only Advertise Cached Tests" option to rootadmin
- phoromatic: Download latest OpenBenchmarking.org test suites/profiles in background thread from the event server
- phoromatic: Add option to pre-seed test installs to systems when otherwise idling
- phoromatic: Support for exporting result files to download as CSV or TXT
- phoromatic: Add phoromatic.list-results sub-command for clients to view recent results
- phoromatic: Add phoromatic.clone sub-command for clients to clone viewable test results

The official release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 will come in late February or early March. You can dig through more of the changes for the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software via the Phoronix Test Suite GitHub. If not using Git, you can download the software from Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.