The Open POSIX Test Suite

A new project known as the Open Posix Test Suite has been put together by four Intel employees, Geoff Gustafson, Julie Fleischer, Rusty Lynch, and Inaky Perez-Gonzalez.

The Announcement states: "The project's current approach to conformance testing is to record assertions from a close reading of the POSIX specifications, and write minimal test cases that prove or disprove these assertions. The test suite will be independent of specific API implementations, and will eventually be easily configurable to work with different implementations. The project aims for OS independence, using only POSIX APIs, the autoconf suite, and simple shell support."

The Open Posix Test suite is licensed under the GPL and work is primarily being done on the Linux platform, although support for other Posix compliant platforms should be possible. "The Open POSIX Test Suite is an open source test suite with the goal of performing conformance, functional, and stress testing of the functions described in the IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 System Interfaces specification. Eventual testing of the full specification is desired." One of the project's goals is to achieve ANSI C compliance with the Linux kernel coding standards.

Testing has been divided into the conformance, functional, and stress categories, for these POSIX function groups:

• Clocks and Timers (TMR)
• Threads (THR)
• Message Queues (MSG)
• Semaphores (SEM)
• Signals

Running a test appears to be fairly easy, the test code just needs to be compiled and executed, test results come as a pass/fail return code with optional messages. According to the documentation:

One of the design goals for the test suite is to make the addition of additional tests easy to do, outside contributions are being welcomed.

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