The New Linux Standard
Efforts to create a Linux standard gained some ground today with the release of the Linux Standards Base (LSB) 3.0 specification. The latest LSB standard is an effort to help prevent the fragmentation of Linux and is widely supported by major Linux vendors.
The LSB specification is maintained and developed by the Free Standards Group and is intended to provide interoperability standards via a base set of APIs and libraries so ISVs can develop and port applications that will work on LSB-certified Linux distributions.
The LSB standard currently supports seven architectures including IA32, IA64, PPC32, PPC64, S390, S390X and X86_64.
LSB 3.0 comes a year after the LSB 2.0 was introduced and includes a number of enhancements over its predecessor.
According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Free Standards Group, the most important thing is that LSB 3.0 contains an updated application binary interface (ABI) for C++, which is supported by all major distributions.
