Phoronix Test Suite 8.4 M3 Brings Improvements For POWER9, Colorful Text Graphs

The third and possibly final development release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 8.4-Skiptvet is now available for testing of our open-source, cross-platform testing and benchmarking framework.

Among the highlights for this third milestone release, two weeks after 8.4.0 M2, include:

- Support for the branded colors in the terminal/CLI text graphs.

- External dependency updates.

- Exporting a new NUM_CPU_PHYSICAL_CORES environment variable for tests that may want to utilize physical core information in a unified manner rather than the overall thread / virtual CPU counts in determining thread/core information for tests.

- Various support tweaks/additions around IBM POWER9 support thanks to having the Talos II system locally. This includes improved CPU cache size detection/reporting on POWER9, better physical core detection for architectures like POWER9, and other helper improvements around benchmarking on POWER.

- Other fixes and tweaks.

Currently I am planning for the official Phoronix Test Suite 8.4 release in the next week or two as this latest quarterly feature update. Download via GitHub.