Ulrich,

You are wrong on a few minor points.

1. NT V3.51 passed successfully the test for POSIX 1003.1 (at the time that was all that was complete) they never made any effort to accomplish anything else. MKS went to some effort to provide 1003.2 when it became complete and did actually provide a full 1003.1/1003.2 set of functionality and when combined with the set of tools they provided was a superset of the POSIX functionality. As for compliance beyond 3.51 you may be correct, (ie 4.0, 2000, etc) who knows... and I'm sure the testing will only continue if absolutely necessary) Bottom line is that it will only continue as long as the requirement (read: sales volume) drives the continued testing.
2. The tests do not cost a fortune since the IEEE still (I believe) owns them, what costs a fortune is the certification by an independent body that a candidate platform meets the tests. The bar was always set high to preclude the unscrupulous vendor from cheating, as many would be prone to do. If one wanted to test Linux it would be fairly cheap if not free to do the testing. And as I mailed Wally privately it would likely come pretty close to passing (my subjective guess would be that it would be about 80% compliant) with no changes, and with some work around certain IPC constructs could probably be made to comply.
3. As you say NT has become an exception throughout the US government. You are so correct. This is not however by ANY written or spoken exception process legal or otherwise. They simply are selectively ignoring their own mandates (another point I made privately with Wally) for their own reasons of narrowing the bidding field. The process has been totally and completely driven by the sales volume of the MS platforms, and MS's grudging acceptance of government requirements for things like security, posix compliance, etc.

As for the tests, compliance of platforms being meaningless. You nailed it! The appropriate body in this case is NIST, which is in bed with the IEEE, however NIST, and in Wally's case the USAF can ignore standards compliance (or in NT's case the lack thereof) on a completely arbitrary basis to meet the 'needs' of the organization (or to rule out a candidate product/solution).

Cheers,

mdw ;-)

PS. I also sent Wally a couple of pointers on the http://www.freestandards.org/ldps/
efforts of the Linux standardization community.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ulrich Drepper [mailto:drepper@redhat.com] Sent: Monday, July 16, 2001 2:11 PM
To: James A Griffin
Cc: Ramsey Wally Contr AFRL/IFEB; 'NSA SELinux Mailing List' Subject: Re: Linux and Posix compliance

James A Griffin <agriffin@cpcug.org> writes:

> One thing that I have noticed for years is the boot time message "POSIX
> conformance testing by UNIFIX". The message appears just after the CPU
> testing and before the PCI: Probe. UNIFIX is a UK company, IIRC. What
> the results of the "conformance testing" are, I do not know.

I think (and hope) they've finally removed this output. It never was true and is anyway completely outdated.

There hasn't been any formal POSIX testing done. The reason is simple: who'd pay this? POSIX testing is done by the certification labs which charge enormous amounts of money for this.

The kernel people has done tests based on available standard tests occasionally. I've done for the C library quite some testing and wrote many tests myself. This still does not guarantee compliance, though.

As for use in government and military. The current route seems to be to get for Linux the same kind of exception which exists for NT. NT does not conform to POSIX either and can be used. You might want to check your appropriate standardization bureau about the status of this.

-- 
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