Friday 26 April 2013

Firmware Test Suite New Features in Ubuntu Raring 13.04

The Firmware Test Suite (fwts) is a tool containing a large set of tests to exercise and diagnose firmware related bugs in x86 PC firmware.  So what new shiny features have appeared in the new Ubuntu Raring 13.04 release?

UEFI specific tests to exercise and stress test various UEFI run time services:
 
  * Stress test for miscellaneous run time service interfaces.
  * Test get/set time interfaces.
  * Test get/set wakeup time interfaces.
  * Test get variable interface.
  * Test get next variable name interface.
  * Test set variable interface.
  * Test query variable info interface. 
  * Set variable interface stress test.
  * Query variable info interface stress test.
  * Test Miscellaneous runtime service interfaces.

These use a new kernel driver to allow fwts to access the kernel UEFI run time interfaces.  The driver is built and installed using DKMS.

ACPI specific improvements:

  * Improved ACPI 5.0 support
  * Annotated ACPI _CRS (Current Resource Settings) dumping.

Kernel log scanning (finds and diagnoses errors as reported by the kernel):

  * Improved kernel log scanning with an additional 450 tests.

This release also includes many small bug fixes as well as minor improvements to the layout of the output of some of the tests.

Many thanks to Alex Hung, Ivan Hu, Keng-Yu Lin and Matt Fleming for all the improvements to fwts for this release.

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