The Linux Test Project (LTP) is an effort to create a set of tools and tests to verify the functionality and stability of the Linux kernel. 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.
The Linux development community utilizes two important (some out argue most important) testing techniques in its 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.
There is no such thing as a perfect test base. It is only useful it if keeps up with new and changing functionality, and if it actually gets used.
Not at this time. We are more interested in functional, regression, and stress testing the Linux kernel. Benchmarking may be workable to compare the performance among kernel versions.
No, we are leaving that to the Linux Standards Base (LSB). See the Linux Standards Base web site for more information.