firmware-testing-team team mailing list archive

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

Hi everyone,

I've been pleased to find that the Firmware Test Suite is 
getting a fair amount of use lately, and consequently people 
have been finding and reporting bugs. So, the last few weeks
have seen fwts get a few bug fix updates. The fixes include:

LP#736874: (version 0.22.08 - coming soon!)
        fix a segfault when running on 64 bit machines with ACPI tables
        that use 32 bit table pointers. This was a subtle bug that
        caused the ACPICA core to segfault.

LP#730132:
        remove the thermal_trip test. This relied on some interfaces
        that got dropped in the natty kernel and made it virtually
        impossible to fix. The test only worked on a handful of machines
        reliably for maverick, so dropping it won't be a big loss.
        
LP#728685:
        cstates needed to use the /sys interface rather than the old
        deprecated /proc/acpi/processor interface.
        
And some minor fixes/tweaks:

 * method test: reference /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone.
 * acpi: acpidump: use more sensible heading, fix SCI text.
 * hpet: Fail test and skip sanity check when base address not found.
 * bios: ebda_region: close and open file descriptor on error handling.

== Documentation ==

I've written some fairly exhaustive documentation, which can be found
at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Reference/fwts

..it is the first cut and I welcome anyone to add more notes if they
deem it necessary.

== What's Next? ==

I've now started throwing some new code into the fwts git 
repo master branch which contains a lot of experimental new 
code.  I've added tests to inspect and dump out the Intel 
MultiProcessor tables, and also there is a new MSR test to sanity 
check a wide range of Intel MSR settings between CPUs. I hope to 
package this up in version 0.23.00 sometime next week and 
put it into the development PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~firmware-testing-team/+archive/ppa-fwts-devel

..use this PPA if you want the last "crack-of-the-day" development code.

== Discussion ==

I'd like to engage discussion in this mailing list - so feel
free to write! If you have any bright ideas for the Oneiric 
release of fwts, or you like to chat about current features 
please send an email to this list! :-)

Keep in touch!

Colin.