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

[Ani Sinha]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 1:39 PM Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Yes they are over 25 MB and my gmail account does not support
attachments more than that size.

>
>
> With regards,
> Daniel
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