List of ongoing tasks

This is a comprehensive list of tasks where LTP maintainers are currently working on. Priorities might change over time, but these are the most important points which are currently being achieved.

Test new syscalls

Syscalls and new syscalls flags are added to Linux kernel each development cycle and LTP still falls behind. Unfortunately there is no single place that would store comprehensive list of syscalls, but there are a few places to look at:

Rewrite old API tests

LTP has a long story and, at certain point of its development, new API were introduced to make kernel testing easier and more efficient. This happened when lots of tests were still using old, messy API.

Some of these tests have been converted to the new API, but this process is still ongoing for many others. To have an overview of the tests using old API, please run the following command inside the LTP root folder:

git --no-pager grep -l 'include "test\.h"' testcases/

Fade out shell scripts

LTP was initially thought as a generic framework for running tests with both shell and plain-C languages. Even if writing tests in shell script might seem easy, the reality is that debugging and maintaining certain test cases is difficult and slow down the whole validation process. This is particularly visible for cgroup tests, since shell doesn’t add enough control over race conditions.

LTP maintainers are working on converting shell scripts to plain-C tests, in order to reduce the impact that shell scripts might have on the overall kernel testing.

For a complete list of shell tests, please run the following command inside the LTP root folder:

git --no-pager grep -l -e '^\. .*_lib\.sh' -e '^\. .*test.sh'

LTP also provides a shell loader implementation for plain-C tests inside testcases/lib/tst_run_shell.c and it permits to run shell tests into plain-C LTP API, featuring struct tst_test initializations and a direct access to kernel syscalls.