Linux Verification Center Manifesto
Linux has established a track record as an industrial strength operating system. It is deployed on an ever increasing number of computers from supercomputers, servers and desktops to mobile phones and embedded systems. We are witnessing the extraordinary growth in the Linux development community including application developers. However, there are outstanding issues, which need to be addressed. Developers are faced with a large and constantly increasing number of Linux distributions from different vendors and they need to take into account the many differences between these packages when they develop Linux applications.
To continue evolving the Linux platform and to gain greater acceptance for Linux, it is necessary to ensure compatibility between the diverse Linux distributions and to increase reliability of the platform as a whole. This objective is a focus for the activities of Free Standards Group and Open Source Development Lab together with their industrial partners such as IBM, HP, Intel, Oracle, Novell, RedHat and many others. One of their ongoing projects is the development of a set of open standards, which all variants of Linux should conform. Linux Standard Base (LSB) standard has already demonstrated considerable advances towards standardizing Linux and ensuring integrity of this platform.
Linux Verification Center based at the Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences with financial support from the Russian Federal Agency for Science and Innovations and from the Free Standards Group is driving towards increasing the reliability and compatibility of the Linux platform by promoting and strengthening open standards and advanced testing and verification technologies. We will develop conformance and functional Linux tests as well as actively participate in the community activities and professional events.
In the real world, even the best standards contain many subtle ambiguities, which are interpreted differently by different implementers. Without the means to check formal conformance of an implementation against the standard, these ambiguities continue to cause problems for both developers and users. Supplementing standards with formal descriptions of their requirements helps to detect ambiguities, to remove any vagueness in the standards text, and to reveal implicit requirements, which are frequently missed even by experienced developers.
We will utilize the deep expertise of the Institute for System Programming in cutting-edge developments and its experience, both theoretical and practical, over the last decade of working with industrial partners in the field of advanced testing and verification technologies including construction of tests automatically derived from formal specifications.
Initially, Linux Verification Center is focusing on formalizing Linux Standard Base Core 3.1 and on creation of the corresponding test suite. With the support of Free Standards Group, we are becoming an active participant of the LSB workgroup. All results of the Center’s projects will be donated to open source community.
In addition to our in-house expertise, the Center recruits the best undergraduate and graduate students from world class Russian universities. These young specialists will be trained to be experts in Linux and in practical use of advanced technologies for software quality assurance.
Our long-term goal is to cultivate a development community for ensuring high quality software and to involve it in the world-wide open source software and Linux development activities. This will help improving the quality of open source software as a whole and Linux platform in particular, thus opening new horizons and application domains for both of them.