New members, US$24 Million in funding mark opening of industry Linux labPortland 24 January 2001 A large non-profit lab, OSDL, designed for developers who are adding new business-oriented capabilities to Linux and Linux-based software opened in Portland, USA, with the support of 19 sponsor companies and more than $24 million in funding.he first OSDL project is a scalability project designed to enhance the Linux operating system to support 16 64-bit processors with near-linear performance improvement.
The Open Source Development Lab(OSDL), an 11,000-square-foot computing center in the high-tech district west of Portland, Ore., provides Linux and open source developers with access to high-end enterprise hardware and an open forum where they can build and test software for powerful servers and business computing environments.
Computer Associates, Fujitsu and Hitachi today joined original lab sponsors Hewlett-Packard Company, Intel Corporation, IBM and NEC Corporation in supporting the lab. Miracle Linux, Mitsubishi and Covalent joined original members Caldera, Dell, Linuxcare, LynuxWorks, Red Hat, SGI, SuSE, TurboLinux and VA Linux as additional contributors and sponsors. The lab is managed by an independent board and officers, as well as a full-time director and staff.
"The Open Source Development Lab provides tremendous resources that enable collaborative development of enterprise-class capabilities in Linux," said Dr. Larry M. Augustin, president and CEO of VA Linux Systems. "Projects supported by the lab will further accelerate the acceptance of Open Source solutions in large-scale business environments."
The first OSDL project is a scalability project designed to enhance the Linux operating system to support 16 64-bit processors with near-linear performance improvement. The second project, identified with jabber.org, an open source company, is focused on increasing Linux TCP/IP concurrent connection support from 20,000 to greater than 64,000.
Under the lab's charter, all projects were established according to the open source development model. The lab does not create projects; rather, it su
pports and accelerates existing or new projects developed by the open source community.
The lab houses several servers that interface with high-speed Internet communications links, providing lab access to developers around the world in order to create a single virtual lab. The companies plan to provide significant hardware updates over the next six months. Future open source development lab locations around the globe will be linked together to provide a unified virtual development environment. More information about the lab, initial projects and staff can be found at
www.osdlab.org
.
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