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<FONT FACE="ARIAL NARROW, HELVETICA" SIZE="5"><B>LTP FAQ</B></FONT>
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<a href="#Q1"><b>What is LTP ?</b></a><br>
<a href="#Q2"><b>Linux aready has a successful testing model. How will this project benefit Linux furthur?</b></a><br>
<a href="#Q3"><b>What is in the LTP, so far. </b></a><br>
<a href="#Q4"><b>How do I build this?</b></a><br>
<a href="#Q5"><b>How do I run this? How does it work?</b></a><br>
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<a name="Q1"></a>
<h3>What is LTP ?</h3>
LTP is the Linux Test Project. LTP is a project that aims to develop
a set of tools and tests to verify the functionality and
stability of the Linux kernel (including regression tests). We hope this will
support Linux development by making unit testing more complete and minimizing user impact
by building a barrier to keep bugs from making it to the user.
<p>
<a name="Q2"></a>
<h3>Linux aready has a successful testing model. How will this project benefit Linux furthur?</h3>
The Linux development community utilizes two important (some would argue most important)
testing techniques in it's normal operations: Design and Code Inspections. The intent of LTP is
to support this by giving developers an ever growing set of tools to help identify any
operational problems in their code that may be missed by human review.
One of the toughest categories of problems to catch with inspection is that of interaction
of features. With a continuously improving set of tests and tools, developers can get
an indication of whether their changes may have broken some other functionality.
<p>
There is no such thing as a perfect test base. It's only useful if it keeps up with new and
changing functionality, and if it actually gets used.
<p>
<a name="Q3"></a>
<h3>What is in the LTP, so far? </h3>
The first release of code from SGI for LTP was a set of tools for testing file systems.
Since that first release, a group of tests we call <i>Quickhit</i> tests have been released.
These are simple tests aimed at running through a few execution paths in a number of system calls.
Watch the news link for updates on the content of the LTP releases.
<p>
<a name="Q4"></a>
<h3>How do I build this?</h3>
We've made a decision to not put effort into a grand build process in favor of a
minimal makefile approach. We did this becuase the project is just starting and we don't
want to impose and "SGI approach" in favor of a more open source approach decided more by
open source contributors. For now, from the root of the tree, a simple 'make' should do
it. Send your build errata to ltp@oss.sgi.com.
<p>
<a name="Q5"></a>
<h3>How do I run this? How does it work?</h3>
Currently, you can't really "run" this -- at least not in terms of a single starting command line.
Instead, LTP is made up of a number of individual test programs. These test programs usually test some
some portion of a feature's functionality. Mosts tests can be run without any command line options.
Others offer variable functionality specified from the command line.
<p>A problem that needs to be
addressed is how to store different command lines and determining when to run them. An example is, should
a bigmem test be run on a 128Mb system?
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