Intel Announces a BIOS Implementation Test Suite

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.'"

Comments

Re:Sandy bridge

[thue]

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

That's not gonna fly too well with overclockers

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:That's not gonna fly too well with overclockers

[SpazmodeusG]

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.

Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Virtualization extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

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

This might help you.

So why need a BIOS in the first place?

[tropophobia]

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.

Re:So why need a BIOS in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So why need a BIOS in the first place?

[Thelasko]

BIOS does actually very little these days.

Then why does it take so frigging long to load?

Re:So why need a BIOS in the first place?

[Cyrano de Maniac]

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.