Proposals

BITS: Testing BIOS/platform issues with Python in a bootloader

Session information has not yet been published for this event.

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Presentation
Scheduled: Wednesday, September 7, 2011 from 10:00 – 10:50am in Alexander Valley Ball Room

One Line Summary

The kernel often has to cope with misconfiguration and bugs in BIOS and ACPI, working around them when possible and reporting them otherwise. These bugs rarely managed to get fixed upstream, and nothing prevents them from recurring on new systems with new BIOSes. Help us change that, and hear about BITS, our system for testing BIOS using Python and ACPICA embedded in GRUB.

Abstract

The kernel often has to cope with misconfiguration and bugs in BIOS and ACPI, working around them when possible and reporting them otherwise. These bugs rarely managed to get fixed upstream, and nothing prevents them from recurring on new systems with new BIOSes. We’d like to change that.

BITS, the BIOS Implementation Test Suite (biosbits.org), provides support for testing and diagnosing these types of issues in a pre-OS environment, including full support for Python scripting in ring 0 with access to hardware and ACPI. We’ve had great success getting BIOS vendors to fix issues tested by BITS, and we’d love to add a pile of new tests to address real issues that kernel developers encounter.

We’ll demonstrate BITS, and explain how we got from “BIOS testing” to “Python and ACPICA embedded in GRUB”. We’ll also explain some of the platform issues that BITS tests for, outline some of the future tests we plan to add, and take suggestions for new tests that would help with issues Linux currently has to work around.

Tags

kernel, BIOS, ACPI, testing, boot, platform, bugs, Python, BITS, GRUB

Presentation Materials

slides

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