Cerberus Test Control System / News: Recent posts

I've released 1.3.0 mostly so people will quit whining about the pre number. The kdiff file corruption test, and the improved smart tests are worth a release. Also I've synced my tree with the main cvs trunk. This may have broken a few things, but the trunk is now merged. Further releases will be based off the trunk.

1.3.0pre8 is the 1st maintenance release. If all goes well I'l release 1.3.0 soon.

I haven't had time to maintain CTCS properly. Sam Flory
will be taking over primary responsibility there, as he's quite familiar with the system and is using it more actively than I am at this point.

I may still submit patches from time to time, but Sam will be leading us on. Wish him luck!

CTCS, the Cerberus Test Control System, is the hardware and software system stress test originally developed by VA Linux Systems to qualify Linux hardware platforms.

This marks the first release without VA sponsorship. Many new features have been added, the biggest of which is the introduction of Linux on PowerPC as a supported platform. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/va-ctcs for details.

OK, my main development box is back up and running again, thanks to a donation from Dave Allen. Stop by his company (www.1u2u.net) to pick up some slim servers.

Hopefully I will have a new version out the door within a week or so.

Well, I'm sorry for the lack of activity on my project. I get laid off on my birthday, and my main machine melted it's CPU. So things have been disrupted. But here's my plans for the future.

Immediate future:
- Portability enhancements. This probably means rewriting some of my bash-fu that depends on fdisk, etc., as I'm planning on porting VA-CTCS to Darwin/OS X and Linux/PPC. (this happens when your x86 machine melts down)
- Autoconf. This goes with the portability enhancements above. I've already played with it a little bit, but..
- Help Wanted. I am looking for additional contributors to the project.... read more

OK, I've been unable to announce this for a while but here it comes: VA will no longer be sponsoring CTCS development. This means I need to get the VA name off the name of the project, but that seems to be difficult to do with Sourceforge.

Until then, understand that 1.3.0pre4 is the last VA sponsored release, everything from now on is me working under my own power. I am looking for a job, please send me e-mail at moby1gnubie@yahoo.com if you would like to hire me. :)

There is a new release out, 1.3.0pre1, that fixes a number of known bugs and introduces new ones -- I mean, new features! ;) Please check out the latest version. I've changed how VA-CTCS's memory test interacts with the Linux VM, as well as added a new report generator. This also marks the first release of VA-CTCS with some extra components "unbundled".

I'm going to drop several of the packages currently distributed with VA-CTCS, including the UCSC Smartsuite, the BYTE benchmarks, and the SGI Linux Test Project. It's just too much to keep them up to date.

Support will remain for use of these packages with VA-CTCS, but you will have to specify where the packages are installed and install them yourself if you wish to use it. I may be providing some RPMs of these packages as there doesn't seem to be any on the web.

See the release notes, but we have a new version of CTCS that is Red Hat 7.0 friendly, among other things. RH 7.0 has a broken compiler that fails to do correct syntax checking on one of the included test modules in Cerberus. Skipping the syntax check actually corrects this problem, strangely enough.

VA-CTCS 1.2.12 is released, with some updates to fix some anomalous behavior on very-large-memory, a new filesystem exercise test module, and additional error triggers for the system log parser. Have fun with the new release!

I've released the next version of VA-CTCS. In addition to the usual list of feature additions and bugfixes, thanks to our friends at rackspace.com, VA-CTCS is now available as a source RPM. Use the usual caution with VA-CTCS as it can and will destroy your system if care is not exercised. Read The Fine Documentation! http://sourceforge.net/projects/va-ctcs

1.2.10 has a couple of small bugfixes related to the system log parser, and support for the Linux-ECC module's error messages.

After extensive testing at VA Linux Systems, the new 1.2 tree of VA-CTCS (VA's Manufacturing and Engineering test suite) has been pronounced stable. We also now include test code from SGI's Linux Test Project.
Download the new version at: https://sourceforge.net/project/filelist.php?group_id=5317

The VA Cerberus Test Control System is approaching a new stable release, as the first round of VA's testing has produced version 1.2.6, available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/va-ctcs . Find out whether your system would survive VA Linux Systems' manufacturing torture test, and use the flexible test architecture to create your own tests to stress your hardware, your kernel, or both.

Remember, VA employees, don't post bugs here unless they specifically relate to Cerberus Test Control System a.k.a. "burn". The other VA-ony Cerberus page should be used for other issues.

If you are a user of the data mode test (-p) please download this release to fix cosmetic issues you've probably been having.

No problems were found with the 1.1.8 release during testing.
I'm now posting the tarball.

If all goes well with testing, the tagged version of CVS will be officially released. This 1.1.8 release is a makefile bugfix only, to add symlinks so it is possible to run the CVS version directly. The tag in CVS is "release_1_1_8" on branch "release_1_1_7_patches", the stable development branch.

This 1.1.8 release will coincide with the 1.2.5 internal release of VA's Cerberus tree. See that project for details.

The new stable branch is off of tag "release_1_1_7_patches". This will be a short branch to create 1.1.8, which will have makefile changes to make 1.1.7 work in CVS (oops).

No other changes will be permitted on this branch.

The tag "release-1_1_7" should get you the latest stable release. Bleeding edge development will occur on the main trunk, I will branch from the above tag in the unlikely event that further stable development will be required.