OpenELA today announced ELValidated, a verification and interoperability suite for Enterprise Linux operating systems. This suite gives organizations and developers the ability to verify the compatibility of their Enterprise Linux distributions. This compatibility enables software and hardware vendors to reduce testing costs, resource commitments, and risk while giving end-users more choice and confidence in using compatible versions, as well as more flexibility in their Enterprise Linux distribution options.
ELValidated is an open source toolkit which uses industry standardized technology to validate the binary interface of libraries in a given operating system. The tool checks the Application Binary Interfaces (ABI) for critical libraries and packages against published ABIs hosted by the OpenELA organization, and Enterprise Linux vendors whose distributions meet this standard can be confident that their distributions are binary compatible with the Enterprise Linux standard. This standard can also be used by software application vendors: vendors whose software is supported on environments that meet the OpenELA Compatibility Standard can be confident that their applications will run on any compatible Enterprise Linux distribution.
ISVs, IHVs, and Linux developers benefit from ELValidated by gaining validation and assurance that their applications can run across all Linux distributions without any modifications or recompilations. ELValidated can be used by organizations to validate changes to existing releases and compatibility between releases, helping verify that features added to a given operating system haven’t broken compatibility with earlier versions. With ELValidated, organizations and developers can increase their scope of support without increasing the testing costs and resources necessary for each Linux distribution.
By enabling organizations and developers that provide Enterprise Linux distributions to demonstrate compatibility with the Enterprise Linux standard, end-users gain the following benefits:
- Demonstrated binary compatibility with Enterprise Linux, including all OpenELA Principal Member distributions
- More choice and interoperability
- Aligned Linux skills and system management
- Reduced overhead
- Reduced business cost
- More secure environments
Greg Marsden, senior vice president of Linux development, Oracle and member of the board, OpenELA
The introduction of ELValidated marks one of OpenELA’s initial goals: to set the standard for Enterprise Linux distributions and give users full confidence in their choice of a distribution. Although we all strive to ensure our Enterprise Linux systems are compatible, ELValidated lets us really prove that, to ourselves (as we build the platforms) and to our users (where the compatibility really matters). ELValidated helps address those challenges by providing a common standard that verifies application compatibility with Enterprise Linux distributions.
Brent Schroeder, head of the office of the CTO, SUSE and member of the board, OpenELA
As organizations’ IT environments become more diverse, they are increasingly prioritizing flexibility and choice in their Enterprise Linux distribution options. ELValidated gives ISVs greater confidence that their applications are compatible across all releases while also benefitting Enterprise Linux distribution providers by assuring their customers that distributions are compatible across all Enterprise Linux environments. This delivers the double benefit of expanding ISV and distribution providers’ prospective customer pools while giving Enterprise Linux users more choice than ever in the distributions available to their organizations.
Gregory Kurtzer, CEO and founder, CIQ and member of the board, OpenELA
For years, we've had general standards for Linux like the LSB, but there’s never been a clear, open and repeatable way to define and validate strict compatibility specifically for Enterprise Linux. This has made life difficult for vendors and end users alike—without a concrete definition of compatibility, there’s always been a degree of uncertainty. CentOS once filled that gap by acting as a common reference, but with its shift away from that role, the industry has been missing a trusted, shared foundation. That’s what makes today’s announcement so exciting. ELValidated from OpenELA gives the entire ecosystem—distributors, ISVs, IHVs and users—a clear, open way to prove compatibility and build with confidence. It’s a huge step forward for transparency, trust and collaboration in the Enterprise Linux world.
