Re: [PATCH 00/12] Introduce new acpi/smbios qtests using biosbits

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2022 at 12:58:44PM +0530, Ani Sinha wrote:
> Biosbits is a software written by Josh Triplett that can be downloaded by
> visiting https://biosbits.org/. The github codebase can be found here:
> https://github.com/biosbits/bits/tree/master. It is a software that exercizes
> the bios components such as acpi and smbios tables directly through acpica
> bios interpreter (a freely available C based library written by Intel,
> downloadable from https://acpica.org/ and is included with biosbits) without 
> an
> operating system getting involved in between.
> There are several advantages to directly testing the bios in a real physical
> machine or VM as opposed to indirectly discovering bios issues through the
> operating system. For one thing, the OSes tend to hide bios problems from the
> end user. The other is that we have more control of what we wanted to test
> and how by directly using acpica interpreter on top of the bios on a running
> system. More details on the inspiration for developing biosbits and its real
> life uses can be found in (a) and (b).
> This patchset contains QEMU qtests written in python that exercizes the QEMU
> bios components using biosbits and reports test failures.
> 
> Details of each of the files added by this patchset are provided in the README
> file which is part of Patch 11. Every effort to contact Josh, through various
> means including email, twitter, linkedIn etc has failed. Hence, the changes to
> build biosbits with the newer compiler, upgrade acpica and other changes are
> currently maintained in a forked project in my personal github. We may want to
> maintain bits in a separate fork in a stable repository that is accessible by
> QEMU developers.
> 
> The newly introduced qtest currently only run for x86_64 platform. They pass
> both when running make check on a baremetal box as well as from inside a vm.
> 
> Thanks to Igor M for pointing me to this work.
> 
> (a) 
> https://blog.linuxplumbersconf.org/2011/ocw/system/presentations/867/original/bits.pdf
> (b) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36QIepyUuhg
> 
> Ani Sinha (12):
>   qtest: meson.build changes required to integrate python based qtests
>   acpi/tests/bits: add prebuilt bios bits zip archive
>   acpi/tests/bits: add prebuilt bits generated grub modules and scripts

These two files didn't arrive on the mailing list, presumaby because
pre-built binaries made the patches way too large.


With regards,
Daniel
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