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BITS: Testing BIOS/platform issues with Python in a bootloader
Session information has not yet been published for this event.
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
slidesSpeaker
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- Website: http://joshtriplett.org/
- Twitter: josh_triplett
- Favorites: View Josh's favorites
Biography
Josh Triplett is a PhD student at Portland State University and a Free and Open Source Software hacker. Josh researches relativistic programming, advanced synchronization techniques for highly parallel systems. Currently, Josh wants to make it easier to assemble software and systems from individual components, with versioning and reproducibility, by building Apters. In his “free time”, Josh builds and launches Linux-powered rockets with the Portland State Aerospace Society, and hacks on numerous other projects . Lately, Josh does a lot of his hacking in Haskell.