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The Linux Standard Base gets some applications
The Linux Standard Base gets some applications
Posted Aug 31, 2006 5:21 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)Parent article: The Linux Standard Base gets some applications
There's a rather important and influential set of application vendors that has for a number of years provided large numbers of applications for Linux: the electronic design automation industry. Every chip produced uses this software, and many applications go for $100K per seat or more. Windows never was a contender for serious chip design; Solaris on SPARCs used to be dominant but Linux has now taken over. However, the EDA industry doesn't pay any attention to the LSB; rather, there are two supported Linux flavors: Red Hat and SuSE/Novell.
The problem with certifying to the LSB is that, since it is a specification, not an implementation, there is no amount of testing that you can do to gain confidence that a complex application that stretches a machine to its limit, like place-and-route for a 100M gate chip, will work on "any LSB system". You can verify that the application uses only APIs mentioned in the LSB spec, but this does not suffice. The vendor can tell the customer that he is welcome to try ChipWhacker on FooLinux, and maybe it will work, but if it doesn't work he'll have to install RHEL or SUSE Enterprise if he wants support. And since ChipWhacker costs $200K and RHEL or SUSE cost less than 1/100th of that, and since if the chip isn't out by Christmas, the company loses millions, what do you think the customer will do?
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The Linux Standard Base gets some applications
Posted Aug 31, 2006 6:25 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
What LSB does is clearly delineates the lines of responsibility. Onwhich side of the LSB spec line does the misbehavior exist, and so
therefore who is responsible.
It is probably reasonable to buy a very expensive LSB-certified
application if you have some sort of very expensive support contract with
FooLinux that promises to resolve any issues with their
LSB-implementation. If you don't have a contract like this, then it is
not so reasonable.
The Linux Standard Base gets some applications
Posted Aug 31, 2006 11:16 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]
Who's responsible is not the issue. The point is you cannot certify that an application works on any LSB system, because no such beast exists.
What I think needs to happen is they need to release a Live CD which supports the LSB and *nothing* else. Then people can install this and run their applications and be confident that it's "LSB compatable".
That's a fair bit of work though...
Take a look at the LSB Sample Implementation
Posted Aug 31, 2006 13:18 UTC (Thu) by kingdon (subscriber, #4526) [Link]
Well, there is http://www.freestandards.org/impl/
The idea of packaging it as a Live CD is a good one, and might be a smaller project than starting from scratch.
Take a look at the LSB Sample Implementation
Posted Aug 31, 2006 21:34 UTC (Thu) by jasonspiro (guest, #38047) [Link]
It sounds like there already is an LSB live CD:
"The LSB-si can be run in one of three different modes: the chroot LSB-si, the UML LSB-si, and the bootable Knoppix LSB-si. Software for each mode can be downloaded from the LSB Download Web site."
--The middle of the Free book Building Applications with the Linux Standard Base
The Linux Standard Base gets some applications
Posted Sep 8, 2006 17:07 UTC (Fri) by wilck (subscriber, #29844) [Link]
Exactly. Same thing with SAP, for example. Actually, same thing with almost every commercial application I have looked at so far.
Unfortunately, it seems that we are watching the emergence of "de-facto industry standards" in the Linux domain, LSB being no more than a niche player.