firmware-testing-team team mailing list archive

[Colin Ian King <colin.king@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings all,

I've been busy trying to improve fwts for the Natty release and I'm now
up to version V0.19.19. So what is new?

== Recent changes in the development version of fwts ==

PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~firmware-testing-team/+archive/ppa-firmware-test

=== New tests ===

acpitables:
        Sanity check key fields in ECDT, FACS, HPET, FADT, RSDP, RSDT,
SBST, XSDT tables. This will be expanded over time, but I've got picked
the fields that cover most common issues we see.

smbios:
        Initial SMBIOS checks (very basic at the moment!). To get this
fully implemented requires a lot of work, so it's a low priority task
for me to complete someday...

I've moved the huge klog kernel log scanning tables out of source and
into a json format data file into /usr/share/fwts. These can be now
imported by Python scripts and makes way for us to do some apport
scripting using the data.

=== New options ===

 * add klog auto-generated LP tags.  --lp-tags option.  The current tag
names are place holders until an agreed tag naming convention can be
settled upon. The tagging info is associated with the klog json data, so
we hope to eventually automate auto-tagging from withing apport or some
LP enabled Python scripts that use the json data.

 * --stdout-summary now outputs FAILED_CRITICAL, FAILED_HIGH,
FAILED_MEDIUM, FAILED_LOW, PASSED, ABORTED, SKIPPED status words

 * add --show-tests-full to dump out tests and their sub-tests headlines

 * add --dumpfile to allow one to load tables from output of fwts --dump
(e.g. acpidump.log file) or from output from acpidump

 * add -q --quiets option to turn off -p

 * add -t as short form of --table-path

 * add -k as short form of --klog

 * make -p (--show-progress) option default and make the progress
feedback more useful.

=== Changes to tests ===
 * mtrr: use MTRRIOC_GET_ENTRY ioctl() rather than parsing /proc/mtrr 

 * maxfreq: add 0.5% tolerance when comparing CPU frequency with BIOS to
stop a load of false fails.

 * cpufreq: make this a batch experimental test - this test needs full
validation to sanity check it works as desired before making it
non-experimental again.

 * klog test: add checks for:
        BIOS IRQ routing queries
        BIOS32 service failures
        AE_TIME timeout errors doing EC read/write transactions
        detect multiple MADTs

Thanks to all who've been sending my patches and ideas for improvements.
I appreciate the feedback!

Colin