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Intel Announces a BIOS Implementation Test Suite

Posted by timothy on from the gnu-way-to-look-at-things dept.

Josh Triplett writes "Intel announced the release of a BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS), a bootable pre-OS environment based on GNU GRUB2 that tests how well (or how badly) your BIOS has configured your platform hardware. BITS also includes Intel's official power management reference code, so you can override your BIOS's initialization with a known-good configuration. 'In addition to those changes to GRUB2 itself, BITS includes configuration files which build a menu exposing the various BITS functionality, including the test suites, hardware configuration, and exploratory tools. These scripts detect your system's CPU, and provide menu entries for all the available functionality on your hardware platform. You can also access all of the new commands we've added directly via the command line.'"

15 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sandy bridge by thue · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why would there be any connection? The Sandy Bridge chipset recall had nothing to do with the BIOS, as far as I am aware.

  2. That's not gonna fly too well with overclockers by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Funny

    a bootable pre-OS environment based on GNU GRUB2 that tests how well (or how badly) your BIOS has configured your platform hardware.


    !!INTEL BIOS WARNING!!

    We have just detect that you've configured your CPU in egg frying mode. Reverting to pansy mode. If you want a fast processor in pansy mode, please contact your nearest Intel dealer and open your wallet.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:That's not gonna fly too well with overclockers by SpazmodeusG · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually simply add a CPU and memory stress test and this would be great for overclocking!

      It's already got all the CPU identification stuff that overclockers need. It boots quick and off a USB drive too!

      The only thing it's missing is a CPU and memory stress tester. With that you'd be able to quickly change settings, reboot and test them without having to stuff around loading a full OS.

    2. Re:That's not gonna fly too well with overclockers by Lazareth · · Score: 2

      I fail to see in what way this wouldn't "fly too well" with overclockers. As far as I can see, there is nothing forcing you to use it. It is a tool that you can choose to use to investigate (and correct) how your BIOS initializes your hardware. Regardless, if you're such a daredevil 1337 tinkerer it should be fairly easy for you to remove this toolset if it somehow came preinstalled on your computer with a configuration that completely bypassed your interaction.

  3. Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Can we finally go to EFI or at least something that's not 20 years old now?

    1. Re:Awesome by rekenner · · Score: 2

      A lot of mobos do use UEFI, switching when Sandy Bridge came out.

  4. Re:Virtualization extensions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Enable_VT-X_on_Mac_Pro_(Early_2008)

    This might help you.

  5. Re:Virtualization extensions by nabil2199 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It doesn't have intel VT
    http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=29753

  6. So why need a BIOS in the first place? by tropophobia · · Score: 3, Interesting

    BIOS does actually very little these days. The OS re-initializes most devices anyway on boot, using BIOS values only for reference. From first look, this release kind of makes BIOS obsolete. If it knows how to fix BIOS misconfiguration, then it can also configure it in the first place. The rest can be taken care by the OS.

    1. Re:So why need a BIOS in the first place? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Because some of us old-timers still run DOS (be it MS-DOS or FreeDOS) that relies solely on the BIOS for interfacing with the hardware so we can that ancient software that runs $$$$ worth of industrial equipment. Now get off my lawn.

    2. Re:So why need a BIOS in the first place? by Bruce+Cran · · Score: 2

      As far as I know the BIOS is unfortunately still involved with anything related to power management through ACPI - suspend/resume etc.

    3. Re:So why need a BIOS in the first place? by Thelasko · · Score: 4, Insightful

      BIOS does actually very little these days.

      Then why does it take so frigging long to load?

      --
      One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
    4. Re:So why need a BIOS in the first place? by Cyrano+de+Maniac · · Score: 5, Interesting

      BIOS does actually very little these days. The OS re-initializes most devices anyway on boot

      Well, actually being a BIOS developer, I can state with absolute confidence that you're wrong about BIOS doing very little these days.

      The BIOS these days takes care of an incredible amount of work, such as detecting, training, testing, and configuring RAM, initializing the CPU state on many cores, configuring the interconnect between processors (QPI on some recent Intel processors, HT on AMD), setting up system memory maps, probing and setting up the entire IO fabric, building tables (e.g. ACPI) that fully describe every nitty-gritty aspect of the system to the OS, make your USB keyboard and mouse functional for ancient OSes, work around problems in hardware, have small drivers for accessing myriad devices for reading blocks from boot devices, in the case of EFI/UEFI manage options for boot ordering as well as bazillions of basic system settings, actually implementing each and every one of those bazillion settings, handle all sorts of hardware abstractions in the form of BIOS/EFI calls, manage and configure IO BARs, provide code to handle all sorts of potential correctable (and sadly sometimes uncorrectable) hardware errors, in some cases provide disaster fallback paths if you manage to corrupt the main BIOS image, in the case of EFI provide a runtime environment for pre-OS applications, etc. -- and do all of this with absolutely nothing underneath it other than hardware. If you think this is "very little", I'd encourage you to find a job developing BIOS code, and I think you'd be overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of the codebase in a modern BIOS. Just the source code trees these days push a fair bit over the 100MB level. Seriously.

      Having also worked on OSes and kernel-level device drivers, it is true that the OS re-initializes a fair bit of the hardware, but not nearly the level of hardware the BIOS initializes (have fun trying to re-train RAM or reconfigure the CPU interconnect, for example). If anything the trend has been toward the BIOS taking on greater and greater responsibility for device initialization and provision of runtime services to make the OS less aware of "quirks" in the hardware. That's not to say there isn't a ton of work the OS still has to do, but your statement vastly over-trivializes the role of the BIOS in modern machines.

      --
      Cyrano de Maniac
  7. Pendrive Linux? by jginspace · · Score: 2

    As it's Grub-compatible, I hope it's going to be easy to add to a multi-boot usb toolkit. Along the lines of: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-multiple-iso-from-usb-multiboot-usb/

  8. Re:So why does memory need retraining? by Agripa · · Score: 2

    DDR2, DDR3, and GDDR5 require skew compensation (and perhaps equalization) for various signals because of manufacturing variations in the signal environment (motherboard, sockets, DIMMs, Number of occupied sockets, DIMM or chip loading, etc.) and in some cases because of the design (DDR3 chains some signals from chip to chip) in order to meet setup and hold requirements. GDDR5 is sensitive enough to require retraining even with temperature variations.