The Phoronix Test Suite supports monitoring system sensors to look at trends and provide other benefits. The Phoronix Test Suite will automatically monitor the selected sensors while each test is running and at the end will then provide the low and high thresholds for each sensor as well as the average. In addition, the sensor results are then plotted on line graphs and can be viewed through the PTS Results Viewer. This sensor detection and monitoring is done through LM_Sensors and ACPI interfaces. The GPU sensor monitoring is done through proprietary ATI and NVIDIA extensions.
The Phoronix Test Suite is capable of measuring the GPU temperature, CPU temperature, system temperature, battery power consumption, CPU voltage, +3.33V line voltage, +5.00V line voltage, and +12.00V line voltage. Additional sensors will be supported in the future.
The full list of supported sensor options can be found by running phoronix-test-suite module-info system_monitor. The sensors actually detected on the current system and their values can be read by running MONITOR=all phoronix-test-suite test-module system_monitor. Selecting sensors to monitor is performed through the MONITOR environmental variable. As examples, to monitor just the CPU temperature while running the universe suite, one would run MONITOR=cpu.temp phoronix-test-suite benchmark universe. To monitor all sensors while running the Nexuiz game, one would run MONITOR=all phoronix-test-suite benchmark nexuiz. To monitor the temperature and voltage of the CPU, run MONITOR=cpu.temp,cpu.voltage phoronix-test-suite benchmark universe. This feature works no matter the suite or test being run.
ACPI will automatically be used if it's supported on the system and LM_Sensors will be used if it has previously been installed and configured (by running sensors-detect as root).
Once the test(s) are completed, the sensor statistics are printed to the standard output and the user is prompted to view the results with the PTS Results Viewer in their web browser. The sensor graphs are saved to their default location of ~/.phoronix-test-suite/system-monitor/. At this time, sensor results cannot be uploaded to Phoronix Global.