PPC32 And IA64 Being Added To LSB Certification

George Kraft (gk4) writes "The LSB is announcing its intention to add PPC32 and IA64 architectures to its certification program; therefore, the workgroup is launching a Certification Pilot for PPC32 and IA64 architectures to evaluate the LSB's runtime conformance test suites. The pilot will continue until Friday December 13th, 2002. This will give Linux distributions and hardware vendors time to evaluate, comment, and get prepared before certification begins in 1Q03. Currently there are seven IA32 Linux releases from four distributions which are LSB v1.2 Certified." Also, "The LSB workgroup has just released for public review its latest LSB v1.3 draft of the generic written specification and for IA32, PPC32, and IA64. The workgroup is soliciting comments from the community until Friday November 8th. (Read on below for details on these changes.)

Specifically, regarding the gLSB, several interfaces were changed either to or from the LSB as the guiding specification based on issues which were raised with the LSB 1.2. The new reference more accurately describes these interfaces. Several interfaces were incorporated from the Li18nux 2000 Specification to better support Internationalization and localization. The descriptions of interfaces defined by the LSB have been clarified and improved overall. The data definitions are more complete now. Some duplications were eliminated and some omissions have been included. Below are details of some of the changes:

New Interfaces

touchline touchwin __isinf __isinff __isinfl __isnan __isnanf __isnanl asprintf freeaddrinfo gai_strerror getaddrinfo getgrgid_r getgrnam_r getnameinfo inet_ntop inet_pton isinff ngettext statvfs64 tdelete pam_acct_mgmt pam_authenticate pam_chauthtok pam_close_session pam_end pam_fail_delay pam_get_item pam_getenvlist pam_open_session pam_set_item pam_setcred pam_start pam_strerror _Unwind_DeleteException _Unwind_Find_FDE _Unwind_ForcedUnwind _Unwind_GetDataRelBase _Unwind_GetGR _Unwind_GetIP _Unwind_GetLanguageSpecificData _Unwind_GetRegionStart _Unwind_GetTextRelBase _Unwind_RaiseException _Unwind_Resume _Unwind_SetGR _Unwind_SetIP, and socket ioctl() commands

Deprecated Interfaces

__dcgettext alphasort alphasort64 endhostent fstatfs fstatfs64 gets sethostent setmntent statfs statfs64 waitid

New Libraries

libgcc_s (Unwind interfaces) libpam

New Specifications

RPM File Format

New ELF Section

.jcr

impressive

[tps12]

I'd like to nominate this story Most Boring Slashdot Story Ever.

Kind Pointless?

[jeramybsmith]

All of the PPC distros that are mainstream are based on x86 distros which are LSB certified or near compliant.

Vendors?

[GoRK]

I suppose this will mean that in order to get LSB 1.2 certified, your software must run on the listed architectures?

Would an application vendor seeking LSB certification be required to release versions of software that worked on the different architectures? IMO, that would be a good thing in an ideal world, but in the real world, it's going to hinder adoption of the LSB because there are going to be companies that it is just not cost effective to develop, maintain, and support their software on multiple architectures. I don't think that's a good idea at all.

~GoRK