Announcing Flent v0.15.0

Announcing Flent v0.15.0

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

This is to announce v0.15.0 of Flent: The FLexible Network Tester.

This release represents eight months of development since v0.14.0. There
are several new features and a bunch of bugfixes.

Starting from this release, Flent will be packaged for Debian unstable
and included in upcoming releases of both Debian and Ubuntu. Thanks to
Iain Learmonth for sponsoring this.

Get the source from PyPi:

  https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flent

  SHA256 checksums:
  2d775f7b612111a3f2a7d4b2b10679ab9fffec6c6844bae9e5e87df37f346954  flent-0.15.0.tar.gz
  c6d3054b9a30ccd6cc474155456735a829bd9389fbfd1c88d3a2773cd1b29278  flent-0.15.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Packages for Ubuntu are available from my PPA:

  apt-add-repository ppa:tohojo/flent

For old Debian versions on Open Build Service:

  https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:tohojo:flent/flent

And for Arch on AUR:

  https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/flent

As usual, please report bugs to flent-users@flent.org or on Github.

Cheers,
-Toke


Changes since v0.14.0 include:

- Several new tests, including the rtt_fair_var* tests and
  tcp_n{up,down} tests which take a variable number of hostnames as
  targets.

- Fixes to the UDP tests and a new test parameter to support setting UDP
  flow bandwidth.

- Support for setting TOS values for some tests.

- Added parser for WiFi statistics such as aggregation size and airtime
  (the latter requires a patched ath9k).

- Support globbing in test plot specifications.

- Added test mixins for adding several types of extra flows by
  specifying test parameters. These include ping flows, VoIP flows, HTTP
  traffic and WiFi and Qdisc stats. The parameters are documented in the
  'tests' section of the man page and documentation.

- Generate a UUID when running a batch sequence, and support grouping
  combination plots on these. This makes it possible to turn individual
  batch sequences into data series when plotting combination plots.

- Support saving the intermedia result sets generated when creating
  combination plots. This speeds up subsequent plottings of the same
  data (which is helpful when experimenting with customising the plots).

- Added a bunch of command line options to customise lots of aspects of
  the plot appearance (labels, legend placement, etc.). See man page or
  --help output for details.

- Add a runner to parse /proc/net/netstat TCPext mib entries.

- Customise plot appearance by directly setting matplotlib RC parameters
  instead of loading an RC file. This means that plots will always use
  the included style unless --no-matplotlibrc is used.

- Allow plotting results from different test names on the same plot.
  This is especially useful with the mixins, which generate the same
  series names independent on which underlying test is used. No checking
  is done for whether two different tests make sense to plot together,
  though, so use common sense.

- Support computing Jain's fairness index as a plot combiner. This means
  that it is now possible to plot the fairness index across averages of
  datasets, for instance to compare average throughput values over whole
  test runs.

- Support computing (and plotting) MOS scores from latency and delay
  values using the ITU G.107 06/2015 E-model.

- Added rudimentary support for running a test runner on a remote host.
  I.e. Flent can now SSH to another host and run (e.g.) a netperf
  instance and add that data into a test.

- Support normalising data series by each other when plotting. This can
  be used to, for instance, normalise individual host throughput values
  by the total throughput to get a fractional value.

- Support using the raw values when reducing data series in combination
  plots.

- A bunch of bug fixes too numerous to list here.