We welcome external involvement. We actually believe that the ultimate test for the success of an open source project is whether it continues living even if its original coordinator can no longer keep the flame. Success, at this point, comes from the participation of others.

The Linux Test Project (LTP) is a unique development project for the open source community. Traditional open source projects aim to develop a specific tool or set of tools to achieve a specific functionality. LTP is different in that it aims to develop tools to test the functionality of the Linux OS, specifically the kernel and related features, without a specific test domain in mind. It is recognized by the project that no matter how many test tools there are, portions of the OS/kernel will remain untested.

With this in mind, the domain of test development is large. This allows test developers the freedom to develop tests for any area of the system. A developer could write anything from a simple test to make sure a system call returns a certain errno under a certain error condition to an elaborate system to test that memory management is working correctly. Simply put, there is no shortage of tests that could be written.

If you're interested in getting involved in this project we recommend joining the mailing list, looking at the source code, and contacting the coordinator of the project to offer your help.

Information on accessing the source via anonymous CVS is available here. The CVS tree can be browsed via CVSWEB here.