Proposals

Diagnosing Linux/Firmware related Issues with the Firmware Test Suite

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Presentation

One Line Summary

Discussion on how to automatically diagnose firmware issue that can affect Linux.

Abstract

Linux and BIOS/ACPI interactions are complex and difficult to diagnose. BIOS misconfiguration and broken ACPI tables can lead to obscure and subtle bugs or kernel warnings that can be difficult to decipher. The Firmware Test Suite has been developed to sanity check for buggy PC firmware that does not confirm to various firmware specifications. The tool also attempts to diagnose issues and provide user friendly advice to help fix or workaround firmware related problems.

Tags

kernel, BIOS, firmware, ACPI, testing, QA

Presentation Materials

slides
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Speaker

  • 04_02_2008_colin_king_64x64

    Colin King

    Canonical

    Biography

    Colin has been working with Linux since the mid-1990s working on porting existing systems to Linux and also enabling Linux on a variety of systems.

    As an embedded engineer for Philips he focused on Very-Long-Instruction-Word media processor integration with MIPS and ARM based Linux systems and also worked on an experimental MMU-less port of Linux to a media processor.

    As a Hardware Enablement Engineering for Canonical he mainly focuses on sorting out BIOS and ACPI issues such as suspend/resume, broken hotkeys and chipset issues. He has developed the Firmware Test Suite to automate firmware testing to catch a variety of Linux/BIOS/ACPI interaction issues.