Table of Contents

LSB 4.1 Release Notes

Introduction

The LSB project team is proud to announce LSB Version 4.1. The specification is available for download at the Specification page. The tools, tests and development environment are available for download at the Download page.

LSB 4.1 contains mostly small changes and additions to LSB 4.0, and is compatible with all previous LSB releases starting with version 3.0.

The LSB consists of a number of components, or modules:

The seven supported architectures for LSB 4.1 are: IA32, IA64, PPC32, PPC64, S390, S390X, X86_64.

There may be other modules or books in an LSB specification development tree but only the above are released as part of LSB 4.1.

Summary of Major Differences

In general, LSB 4.1 is a superset of LSB 4.0, with some new components added. We expect broad compatibility between LSB 4.0 and 4.1, with most LSB 4.0-certified distributions able to certify to LSB 4.1 with very few changes.

In a number of places, the standards have been relaxed or adjusted a bit to correct errors and accommodate a larger number of use cases.

Sample Implementation

Sample Implementation development has been put on hold, and is no longer required for certification.

Trial Use Components

LSB 4.1 contains no Trial Use components.

The LSB 4.0 Trial Use submodules, Multimedia (ALSA), Security (NSS) and Desktop Miscellaneous (xdg-utils commands) are part of the LSB 4.1 as required submodules.

Java

Licensing issues for the Java compliance test suite make it impossible to include Java as a language in the LSB. Therefore, Java has been removed from Trial Use status.

The work group is investigating the feasibility of creating an LSB-compliant Java runtime environment that could become part of a future LSB-SDK release.

New and Upgraded Libraries

The following libraries have been upgraded:

New Interfaces

A full list of the new interfaces is too long to relate here, but can be found on the LSB Navigator's statistics page. Besides the library upgrades mentioned above, here are some highlights:

New Tests

Three new test suites have been released for LSB 4.1.

First, ALSA has a new test suite, using the T2C harness; this test suite made it possible to promote ALSA to a required standard in the LSB.

Second, a new core test suite, also based on the T2C test harness, has been contributed by IBM.

Finally, ISPRAS has released a test suite for libxml2 based on the AZOV test harness.

New Commands

The xdg-utils specification, which had been a Trial Use standard in LSB 4.0, is now required. This includes the commands “xdg-desktop-icon”, “xdg-desktop-menu”, “xdg-email”, “xdg-icon-resource”, “xdg-mime”, “xdg-open”, and “xdg-screensaver”.

Besides the xdg-utils commands, a number of additional core commands have been added: “alias”, “bg”, “fc”, “fg”, “hash”, “jobs”, “string”, and “unalias”.

Bug Fixes

A number of bugs have been fixed as part of this release. A complete list may be found in the tracking bug in the LSB's bug database. Here are a few highlights:

More Information and Feedback

The Linux Foundation keeps track of issues with the 4.1 specification and software on their Web site, and welcomes comments. Issues can be found in our bug tracker, on the mailing list at lsb-discuss@lists.linux-foundation.org, and on several LSB Wiki pages, especially TestPilot41.