firmware-testing-team team mailing list archive

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

Hi again,

So what is going to appear in fwts for Oneiric?  Well, one thing I 
wanted to focus on in this cycle was to stabilize fwts and shake out the 
bugs in the code (yes, there are bugs!). I've run fwts against *a lot* 
of gathered data sets and given it a thorough workout.  Consequently 
lots of small and silly bugs have been fixed so far in this cycle:

    acpi: method: detect zero sized access bit width (LP: #816877)
    acpi: method: only derefernce non-null _DOD objects (LP: #816824)
    lib: acpica: make hash unsigned int (LP: #816819)
    lib: fix ARM FTBFS (LP: #814745)
    apcica lib: fake PCI config reads (LP: #813376)
    acpi: syntaxcheck: fix segfault due to null error list (LP: #805980)
    kernel: oops: make oops failures critical (LP: #797649)
    lib: fwts_framework: (LP: #789114) incorrect aborted total
    lib: fwts_acpi_tables: (LP: #784013) cannot load tables.
    lib: fwts_iasl: (LP: #781709) segfault on bad input
    acpi: method: (LP: #744405) incorrect semaphore counts

..and quite a few more besides that. I didn't want to bore you with all 
the grim details.

So what is new apart from bug fixes?

== New tests ==

s3power
    This puts the machine into an S3 suspended state and then wakes it 
up after ten minutes (or longer if specified by --s3power-sleep-delay) 
and estimates the power used when suspended. I advise keeping the 
machine suspended for an hour or two for more accurate results.

msr
    This checks if the CPU MSR registers are consistent across multiple 
CPUs

mpcheck
    This checks if the MultiProcessor tables are sane (see 
http://download.intel.com/design/pentium/datashts/24201606.pdf)

mpdump
    This produces an annotated dump of the MultiProcessor tables

ebdadump
    This dumps out the Extended BIOS Data Area which can contain 
floating table pointers and dynamically configured BIOS data tables. 
This is for hard-core BIOS hackers who just figure things out from raw 
memory dumps.

== And what's improved? ==

method test:
    reduce infinite AML loops to 256 iterations and turn such issues 
into a warning and not an error since the reason it got stuck is 
probably because the AML code is trying to communicate to the Embedded 
Controller, which you can't easily do from user space.  (And because 
life is not long enough to wait for an infinite loop to complete).

klog test:
    This incorporates 7 more BIOS tests, this time covering MTRR BIOS 
misconfiguration tests.

And finally, each test failure message now contains its own unique ID, 
which allows one to collate data and check for common bugs across systems.

== Where can I get it? ==

Well, most of this has landed in Oneiric universe already, but one can 
pick it all up from the fwts Development PPA for Oneiric, Natty and 
Maveric at ppa:firmware-testing-team/ppa-fwts-devel

And for those who want to run the crack-of-the-day latest builds, you 
can pick up all the latest goodness (which will hit Oneiric fairly soon) 
at ppa:firmware-testing-team/ppa-fwts-unstable-crack - but expect this 
to be a little unstable since it's got new code that currently being tested.

Enjoy