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OSDL Bolsters Linux Kernel Testing

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium of technology companies dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux, announced a major upgrade of its Scalable Test Platform (STP) enterprise-grade testing services for the Linux kernel.

"Linux is increasingly seen running critical applications," said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of system software research at industry analyst firm IDC. "As these workloads become more complex, tools, such as STP, could be a valuable addition to an organization's test environment."

Introduced in 2001, STP is available online and free-of-charge to qualified developers through the OSDL Web site at www.osdl.org. STP provides a set of test suites on a wide range of hardware platforms for validating changes to code in the Linux kernel, automatically tracking performance and quantifying stability. For example, STP makes it possible for enterprises to test patches and company-specific Linux systems for stability and performance prior to production deployment.

The latest release of STP, version 3.0, broadens the range of features to help developers simulate real-world data center environments on the Linux kernel and the impact of different workloads on the most widely-used open source databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL and SAPDb.

"A mandate from our members and the development community is to make OSDL a leader in Linux testing," said Timothy Witham, CTO of OSDL. "That's why we created STP and why we invested more than $15 million in our data center testing systems and make them available to developers around the world."

To ensure stability in Linux, developers and OSDL Lab experts used STP during the transition development phase of the kernel from 2.5 to the production 2.6 release at the end of 2003, performing more than 1,000 kernel tests on average each month. Since then the Lab has run more than 10,000 additional tests on the 2.6 production kernel. Each kernel release is tested automatically and the test results are available at www.osdl.org/projects/26lnxstblztn/results/.

"The STP was helpful to us in delivering a stable 2.6 kernel at the first release," said Andrew Morton, lead maintainer of the production Linux kernel. "Any developer or organization working around the kernel will find this a useful tool."

Developers and testers use STP in two ways. They can automatically test the main kernel tree and critical sub-trees using tests such as LTP, reaim, tiobench, iozone, dbt2, dt3 and more. They can also test for specific changes to the kernel by uploading patches to a specific kernel tree, and requesting a test or suite of tests to be run across a variety of server configurations, from simple single processor systems to large, 8-way SMP servers. All test data are archived and posted publicly on the OSDL Web site.

STP has added many critical test suites since its inception, including Kernbench, contest, reaim, and the Open POSIX Testsuite. Test result summary pages are also available for tiobench, reaim, and iozone. With the 3.0 release, STP can now test applications such as Postgres and sysstat with the kernel. In addition, testing new process architectures is now possible. support. New cross-compile filters add support for testing against the PPC, PPC64, Sparc, Sparc64, x86_64, and Alpha chip architectures. A new advanced search tool makes it much faster and easier to research and retrieve archived test results.