The OSDL Scalable Test Platform

The Open Source Development Lab has announced version 2.0 of its Scalable Test Platform (STP). STP is both a development project (available from SourceForge) and a service which has been made available to the kernel development community. Most developers are probably able to arrange for testing on their own systems, so the STP service is likely to be of the most interest.

Essentially, STP manages the building and testing of patched versions of the Linux kernel. The OSDL STP implementation has a set of systems which are available to do this testing. For now, at least, all of these systems are Intel-based; the largest box has eight processors and 8GB of memory. Interested developers can load their patches into STP, and select a system type of interest. When the hardware becomes available, a kernel is built with the developer's patches, and any of a set of tests are run; the results are then passed back to the developer.

The STP overview page suggests that STP testing can help get code accepted into the kernel. So far, there has not been a flood of developers using STP results to promote their patches. STP is, however, a useful tool that can help provide serious testing of patches on hardware that is not available to many developers.

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