Phoronix News Archives

It's official: Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" and OpenBenchmarking.org will be launching next month at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, California.

To all Phoronix readers, have a happy and prosperous new year! Prosit Neujahr! Godt Nytt År! Here's how to celebrate the new year.

With Iveland Alpha 5 arriving earlier today and more information beginning to be released about OpenBenchmarking.org for its February debut with Phoronix Test Suite 3.0, many have become more curious about what this project entails. Last week I posted a few very small screenshots of OpenBenchmarking.org in its current form. I also have already said OpenBenchmarking.org will become bigger than Phoronix itself, so here are a few statistics right now.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" Alpha 5 has been released this morning. This is the last alpha release for Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 before it goes into beta in preparation for its February release target. This fifth alpha release focuses upon more of the OpenBenchmarking.org integration work for its debut alongside Phoronix Test Suite 3.0.

As a gift to Phoronix readers this Christmas, here's a sneak preview on what you can expect next year.

Now available is Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" Alpha 4 and it is one exciting release. As said last week in Bye-Bye Test Profiles & Suites; Hi OpenBenchmarking.org, this release strips out the test profiles and test suites from the Phoronix Test Suite client and moves it into the OpenBenchmarking.org cloud. With initial integration for OpenBenchmarking.org in place for the Phoronix Test Suite, things are now on the verge of becoming a lot more interesting.

For those not tracking the Phorogit code of the Phoronix Test Suite, all of the test profiles and test suites living within our open-source benchmarking software have been removed. All 130+ test profiles and ~50 test suites have been dropped, as they're no longer living within the benchmarking package.

Last year we introduced Phoromatic as an extension to the Phoronix Test Suite for making it easy to build a benchmarking test farm or simply benchmarking systems across the world all from a simple and easy-to-use web-interface where all of the test results are also stored. A few months after launching Phoromatic, Phoromatic Tracker launched as an extension to that for being able to monitor the performance of a given software component on a timed basis or even on a per-commit VCS basis (or when externally triggered otherwise). As an example of that, we launched our Linux kernel test farm, which has now been running for a year.

Two weeks have passed since the release of Iveland Alpha 2, but now it's time for the third alpha release for the Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" benchmarking platform. Quite a number of changes have built up over such a short period of time as this release nears OpenBenchmarking.org integration and ready for its planned release in Q1'2011.

November was a fairly interesting month at Phoronix with an increased number of articles (thanks directly to our advertisers) and some particularly interesting tests: five years of Linux kernel benchmarks, compiler benchmarks of GCC/LLVM/Clang/DragonEgg, a look at at a Linux kernel patch to improve responsiveness, ZFS Linux benchmarks, Solaris 11 benchmarks, the newest ATI Gallium3D driver, a historical look at Fedora's performance, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 benchmarks, among other articles. However, December should be another interesting month at Phoronix too.

With the holiday shopping season now getting underway, don't forget about our Internet shopping links if buying any goods this year at NewEgg (or NewEgg Canada) and Amazon.com. Simply clicking these links when you do your shopping will result in affiliate income for us that goes to support our Phoronix news coverage and reviews along with our open-source test suite development.

For those of you that use Phoromatic, our web-based remote test management system to the Phoronix Test Suite, the public web-site is now accessible via HTTPS (Phoromatic.com) and in the latest Git code for the Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" release the test result / system log communication to the server is done via HTTPS as well. This has been of interest to some organizations that may be testing unreleased hardware or software while using our non-Intranet version of Phoromatic and is coming just a week after OpenBenchmarking.org received some improvements, including HTTPS support.

If you're seeing this message here, you have reached our new server for Phoronix.com. The new server for Phoronix.com as part of the new Phoronix Media infrastructure for empowering OpenBenchmarking.org, Phoronix Test Suite, etc, went live this afternoon on 20 November.

Only ten days have passed since the first Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 Alpha release, but in time for the weekend there is the second alpha release. As I shared earlier this week about what's going on with Iveland and OpenBenchmarking.org, there is a lot going on. All of the latest work can be found in Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" Alpha 2.

If you've had a hard time accessing Phoronix.com this morning, you're not the only one. The main Phoronix web-server is getting clobbered at the moment. This is due to lots of attention to the small Linux kernel patch that is doing wonders to the desktop in terms of enhancing the system responsiveness/interactivity under CPU load. The main Phoronix.com server CPU load should be back to normal shortly, but fortunately this will be less of a problem in the future.

For those that don't subscribe to the Phoronix Test Suite mailing list, there is a new announcement: Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" Alpha 1 has been released.

For those interested in the development activity of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland", here's an update as to the progress with a few notes.

This morning on Phoronix you may notice that there are no ads being served on Phoronix and you are able to view entire articles on a single page. Well, this is a preview of Phoronix Premium.

Earlier this week I shared part of the vision that Matthew Tippett and I have for OpenBenchmarking.org (the next-generation version of Phoronix Global) and how it will change Linux benchmarking when launched with Phoronix Test Suite 3.0. One of the features of OpenBenchmarking.org / Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" is a major overhaul to the result graphs. Here's a preview of what's to come and we welcome your feedback.

The below logo (intentionally blurred for now) was spotted at Oktoberfest... What is it? Well, something new to be announced next month that as one of those hearing the talk said, "Scheiße! This will cause the most transparent benchmarks in the industry."

With the X Developers' Summit this week happening in Toulouse there are around 50 developers responsible for a majority of the work that goes on within the open-source Linux graphics scene from the open ATI and Intel drivers to the Wayland Display Server and planning of Mesa and DRI2, among many other topics. I'm sure many of you have questions for them (see the attendance list) whether it's about the future of their given project or views on a particular matter. If you do, ask them in this forum thread from the comments link below.

For those using our Phoronix Test Suite for performance benchmarking, regression monitoring, or running other automated tests atop our open-source platform/framework, the 2.8.1 update to "Torsken" is out this morning. There's just a couple of small bug-fixes since the 2.8 release less than two weeks ago.

There is just two weeks to go until Munich's 177th Oktoberfest gets underway (though it's the 200 year anniversary) and again there will be a Phoronix presence this year at Oktoberfest.

Last week when releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Beta 2 I anticipated it being the last development release for this next major update to the Phoronix Test Suite that's codenamed Torsken, but things have changed. Due to a number of commits over the past week bringing both bug-fixes, new test profiles, and some minor feature enhancements, a third beta release has been made available and the final Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 release is expected to follow next week.

The second beta release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 (a.k.a. Torsken), which may also serve as the last development milestone, is now available. This release brings GTK2 GUI improvements, various bug-fixes, a new OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL benchmark, and a new multi-threaded path tracing benchmark.

The Phoronix Test Suite is one of the few mainstream projects that uses PHP-GTK, a PHP5 extension that provides bindings for the GTK+ tool-kit on the desktop, for its user-interface. Unfortunately, PHP5-GTK packages can be found in very few distribution repositories even while the Phoronix Test Suite can be found in most any modern distribution.

In preparation for a stable release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 "Torsken" later this month or in early September, Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Beta 1 has been released this afternoon. This newest development release continues to build upon the many internal changes introduced in the two prior alpha builds in preparation for some major features to be introduced with Phoronix Test Suite 3.0.

A few months back we began publishing some open-source Windows benchmarks once the Phoronix Test Suite started picking up Microsoft Windows 7 x64 support to join Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and Mac OS X as another supported testing platform. We had published Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 benchmarks and then a benchmarking threesome of Windows, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. We had also benchmarked EXT4 vs. the NTFS file-system while the real loser throughout all of this testing was the Intel Linux graphics driver as being the really sore spot for Linux performance when compared to Windows throughout all of our tests. A new set of Windows vs. Linux benchmarks are to be carried out over the next week or two and we will be running even more tests this time around.

For a fourth year we will once again be hosting the annual Linux Graphics Survey at Phoronix. This survey is designed to quantify what areas of the Linux graphics stack that end-users are most interested in, the popularity of the different Linux drivers and hardware in use, and to collect other metrics of interest to developers and other stakeholders.

It's been nearly a month since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Alpha 1, so it's about time that 2.8 Alpha 2 is released. As such, this morning Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Alpha 2 (codenamed Torsken) was officially tagged and released. The code difference between these two development releases amounts to over 8,200 lines of changed code as it continues receiving preemptive work for Phoronix Test Suite 3.0.

Earlier this week I mentioned how the Phoronix Test Suite can use Btrfs to find regressions incredibly fast in conjunction with Phoromatic as part of our Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 efforts. For a while I've also been mentioning that a complete overhaul of Phoronix Global is in store for this Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 milestone that should be reached by year's end. While I'm not yet prepared to share many of those plans for Phoronix Global, there are some interesting statistics worth sharing about the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoronix Global usage up to this point.

After you're done reading about how Btrfs support within the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic is going to make bisecting bugs / regressions go very fast, you may want to stop by Phoronix-Test-Suite.com as the first alpha release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 "Torsken" is now available.

It's been about a month since releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 (codenamed "Lyngen"), so now it's time to shed some details about the next major release.

It was on the 5th of June 2004 that I had founded Phoronix and it was two years ago that version 1.0 of the Phoronix Test Suite (codenamed "Trondheim") was officially released. So happy 6th birthday to Phoronix and this can also be celebrated as the 2nd birthday of our open-source automated benchmarking software.

The first and perhaps only point release for Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 "Lyngen" is now available. This 2.6.1 release, which is coming about two weeks after the availability of Phoronix Test Suite 2.6.0, largely brings bug-fixes but it also presents support for anonymously reporting installed software/hardware.

A month ago we began reporting some Linux hardware statistics from those Phoronix Test Suite users that utilize Phoronix Global for uploading their test results publicly so that they can share their benchmark scores with others and make it very easy for their friends or colleagues to compare their performance numbers via the Internet. In an effort to better track such hardware / software statistical information of the installed Linux base (as well as for other operating systems where the Phoronix Test Suite is supported), we are rolling out a new feature to expand upon this information.

The third -- and potentially final -- beta release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 "Lyngen" is now available. This release contains various fixes, more updates to the new PTS Results Viewer, graphing improvements, a new Phodevi sensor architecture, a Phodevi sensor that serves as a GPU fence counter, and a couple of other changes. There's also random bug-fixes.

If you've been noticing on Phoronix over the past day or so when loading pages, occasionally a large, horizontal ad loading on the left side of the web-site where the vertical "skyscraper" ads are appearing, please let us know. We haven't been able to reproduce this problem ourselves and our ad provider, IDG TechNetwork, has only had limited success in reproducing this problem -- it seems to mainly affect European readers. However, this certainly does obstruct the viewing process and is indeed a bug that we are looking for our ad provider to address as soon as possible.

For those looking to run any sort of automated benchmarks on Linux, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, BSD, or even Windows 7 x64, the beta 2 release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 "Lygen" has been released this morning.

On Phoronix Global we have more than 25,000 benchmark result submissions from independent users around the world since launching the public version of the Phoronix Test Suite back in early 2008. As I have been hinting at for several months, with the launch of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 by the end of this year, Phoronix Global will be getting its long overdue overhaul and there are some revolutionary features being worked on as it concerns benchmarking and collaborative testing. This evening, however, there are some hardware statistics to share for the more than 25,000 existing result uploads.

Since early November when we shared that the Phoronix Test Suite would be ported to Windows 7 we have been working it into a state where it's now possible to compare the performance of Windows vs. Linux and also Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenSolaris too. Last month we then shared we were beginning to prepare for a Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS comparison with a great number of tests.

For those of you not Phoronix Premium subscribers, between now and the first of May, when you visit a new article or news posting you may be greeted by a landing/welcome overlay screen with an advertisement courtesy of SAP. While this may not be the most ideal for browsing, this ad will only ever appear once per IP address and can be easily closed using the link that says "Close Window", or you can also visit the advertiser. It's that simple and will not infer with any other browsing experience.

This morning the 2.6 release of the Phoronix Test Suite that's codenamed Lyngen has reached its first beta milestone. With that there are now about a dozen test profiles compatible with the Phoronix Test Suite on Windows 7 x64 operating systems plus many other improvements to other areas of our automated testing framework and open-source benchmarking software.

This week at Phoronix has been busy with more articles (and news posts) than usual. In fact, most days have had more than one new article. The week began by benchmarking the AMD FirePro V8800, then providing four years of Ubuntu benchmarks via their Long-Term Support testing, offering a look at Fedora 13 Beta, file-system benchmarks with the Linux 2.6.34 kernel, ATI graphics in Fedora 13, the need for Nouveau driver power management, and this morning was testing out the Btrfs system rollbacks in Fedora 13. The week is not over and there will be at least one more Phoronix article before the week is out and certainly more news items too.

It's been three weeks since Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 2 was released (compared the usual two weeks, due to the tour of Chernobyl), but the third alpha release for this next release codenamed "Lyngen" is now available.

While most Linux users are fine with just using the kernel supplied by their distribution vendor, there are some enthusiasts and professional users who end up tweaking their kernel configuration extensively for their needs, particularly if they are within a corporate environment where the very best performance and reliability is demanded for a particular workload.

You may notice Phoronix taking a really long time to load this morning or the pages even timing out. This is because of the Chernobyl photographs that were posted yesterday and they are now on SlashDot.

As previously mentioned, today I am leaving for Kyiv, Ukraine to tour the Chernobyl disaster site of the terrible nuclear accident almost 24 years ago (just a few days shy of its anniversary).

While a slight deviation from our usual roundabout with Linux news, benchmarks, and graphics driver articles, two weeks from today I have the unique opportunity to tour the Chernobyl disaster site and surrounding areas like the deserted Pripyat and Red Forest. As those into technology (like those reading Phoronix) seem to have interest in Chernobyl whether it be due to computer games they have played that are based around the Chernobyl site or simply due to the history and fascination by nuclear power and the unfortunate disaster in Ukraine, I will be posting some photographs and HD videos from what Chernobyl looks like in 2010. This will be on Phoronix and potentially a new Phoronix Media site for hosting the high resolution versions and the media may be potentially CC-BY-NC-ND licensed.

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.