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OSDL Page of
Craig Thomas
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Articles
Open Source Is Coming: Here's How to
Deal With It This paper, presented at the 2005 Pacific
Northwest Software Quality Conference in Portland, Oregon, provides
a brief overview of some aspects about open source software, benefits of
incorporating FOSS into your environment and provides tools that could
be used. It is focused more on a developer/tester of a project, rather
than an IT organization. The paper is complemented by this
presentation.
Verification, Validation, and Test of the Linux
Kernel This article outlines some of the quality efforts ongoing
to verify and validate the quality of the linux kernel. It also begins
to describe the Linux Stabilization Project for the 2.5 kernel. This
paper appeared in the 3rd Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering:
Taking Stock of the Bazaar as part of the International Conference on
Software Engineering 2003.
Configuration Management Practices and Tools Used for
Linux Kernel Development This paper explores some of the practices
and tools used for open source configurations management, using the practices
employed by the Linux kernel developers as a case study. The paper
analyzes the practices performed in the Linux community for the configuration
infrastructure, configuration identification, configuration control, status
accounting, and audits. Finally, the paper describes a set of CM tools
developed at OSDL for managing kernel configuration items and running tests
against those items: the Patch LIfecycle Manager and the Scalable Test Platform.
The paper was presented at the 2003 International Conference on Software
Quality.
A Survey of Quality Practices in Open Source Software
and the Linux Kernel This paper, presented at the 2003 Pacific
Northwest Software Quality Conference, outlines some of the development
practices as well as the verification, validation, and test efforts used to
aid in the quality of Linux releases. Examples of some of the tools
used within the Open Source Development Labs to enhance the quality of Linux
is also presented. The paper also outlines some areas where more effort is
needed to further improve the quailty of Linux.
Database
Workload Overview This article provides a brief overview of the
database workloads developed and used at OSDL for testing the Linux kernel.
Test Results
Linux 2.4.18 VS. 2.6.0 Process Scheduler Improvements
Tests were conducted on 1-way, 2-way, 4-way, and 8-way systems under a 2.4.18
kernel and a 2.6.0-test9 kernel to determine the differences in the characteristics
of the process scheduler. The report concludes that the scheduler in 2.6.0 is more
efficient and scales better on larger systems than 2.4.18.
Linux 2.6 Durability Test Using OSDL-DBT-3
The OSDL database workload for decision support, OSDL-DBT-3, was
used to conduct a durability test that stressed an early release of the
Linux 2.6 kernel for a duration of 2 weeks. The report shows that Linux
is robust enough to withstand a 2 week continual exercise of a fairly
stressful database load. This test was conducted in December 2003. This
report was written by Jenny Zheng.
Sites for Free/Open Source Tools
One of the most obvious ways to find a potential tool is to google for it.
Another method is to go to the project home page, such as Apache, samba,
etc. Most organizations that create F/OSS products will end in .org
(such as samba.org, or postgresql.org). Other web sites organize F/OSS
packages and provide a large repository of information or host the actual
projects. Below are a few of the sites one can use to find tools that may
help in their day to day activities:
opensourcetesting.org
This site aims to boost the profile of open source testing tools within
the testing industry. It provides a list of good tools that are organized
into testing functions such as functional test tools, performance test
tools, test management tools, etc.
freshmeat.net
This site maintains the web's largest index of software packages for
various operating systems. The site maintains a large database of open
source packages organized into specific categories. This is a good site to
begin your search for any open source application, but be warned, this is a
huge database of applications; it may take you some time to find the right
application. The site is actually a portal to many project communities.
It offers documentation, code, chat channels, etc.
sourceforge.net
Touted as the world's largest open source software development web site,
it provides free hosting to tens of thousands of projects. This is one
of the most common repositories of F/OSS products. Each entry is actually
an open source project page where one can participate, or just download the
latest code.
thefreecountry.com
This site provides a collecton of free programming resources for the
developer. It contains downloads for compilers, programming libraries,
development tools and utilities, and other items vital to developers when
producing a product.
savannah.gnu.org
This site contains free software projects accepted by the GNU organization
Lists of software packages can be found by navigating the "Full
List" link under the Hosted Projects section.
tigris.org
This site is a portal to an open source community focused on hosting tools
for collaborative software development. This site provides a much narrower
field and removes some of the noise attributed to dead projects and those
unrelated to software development tools.
koders.com
This is a free search engine that provides developers with a way to find
source code examples and discover new open source projects which can be
leveraged in their applications. It searches a large database of open
source code, so if code fragments are copied, one must be careful that
copyrights and licenses are not violated.