Intel Announces a BIOS Implementation Test Suite 66
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.'"
Re:Sandy bridge (Score:5, 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.
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Obligatory pedantry: The Cougar Point chipset was the one subject to recall. The Sandy Bridge processors were fine.
Many motherboards with Marvell controllers had sufficient numbers of SATA ports for most users, making a lot of recalls logically unnecessary but still ethically correct. I think doing the right thing and doing it so quickly after discovering the problem counteracts the embarrassment factor.
Nice one Intel (Score:1)
I don't often praise Intel (as their business practices seem overly shady on occasion) but I can definitely see this as being of use. Nice one guys.
Now to try and integrate it into my pxe environment...
That's not gonna fly too well with overclockers (Score:5, 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.
Re:That's not gonna fly too well with overclockers (Score:5, 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.
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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.
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It's open source, so it would be trivial to remove that.
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Why would they bother? Overclockers are the same people who buy Intel chips twice as often as everyone else.
Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we finally go to EFI or at least something that's not 20 years old now?
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One doesn't need info on how bad BIOS did its job.
Then perhaps this tool isn't targeted at you as much as system builders and the press.
Virtualization extensions (Score:2)
Anybody knows if this can be used to enable VT-x on a cpu that the BIOS has disabled it on?
I have HP machine with a Intel Core2 Duo E4400 and the BIOS does not have a switch to enable it for some reason.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Enable_VT-X_on_Mac_Pro_(Early_2008) [linux-kvm.org]
This might help you.
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It doesn't have intel VT
http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=29753 [intel.com]
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Weird, I looked it up a couple of months ago and found a similar table listing that it had Intel virtualization technology.
Must have misread it, thanks for the info.
No VT on E4400 (Score:2)
EM64T, SSE 1, 2 & 3, but no VT.
Seems like you're SOL...
Direct boot to Linux (Score:2)
Looks like it allows you to skip the BIOS and load a Linux kernel directly. Sort of like coreboot [coreboot.org].
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My bad. It's only pre-OS, not pre-BIOS. Looks like we'll have to waste 30 seconds on the BIOS after all.
So why need a BIOS in the first place? (Score:3, Interesting)
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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 $$$$ worth of industrial equipment. Now get off my lawn.
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Ok, so we'll leave the BIOS as a standard item in PCs that come equipped with ISA or MFM drive controller cards. :)
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Commission some legacy stuff and leave us alone!
We do not have to pay for your obsolescence.
Driver layer latency (Score:2)
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ooh! I see a business opportunity that'll require you to splash out $$$$ for a new version of exactly the same thing.
ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.
sure, you'll be pissed, but you know, someone's got to stimulate the economy and the rest of us have been playing this legacy upgrade dance for years.
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As far as I know the BIOS is unfortunately still involved with anything related to power management through ACPI - suspend/resume etc.
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Re:So why need a BIOS in the first place? (Score:5, Insightful)
BIOS does actually very little these days.
Then why does it take so frigging long to load?
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It's waiting for you to press the 'Any' key to continue.
Hard disk spinup and RAM testing (Score:2)
Then why does it take so frigging long to load?
BIOS does very little, but one of the things it does is a basic test of all the memory in a machine. That takes a while to work. Besides, if it were much faster, your hard disk wouldn't have a chance to spin up.
Re:So why need a BIOS in the first place? (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.
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It's surprising how common the idea that "BIOS does very little" is, even amongst developers.
The coreboot guys did a Google tech talk [youtube.com] about all the fun they had during their initial LinuxBIOS days as they began to discover just how much work a BIOS does. It's an hour long but quite fascinating!
He's a PHB in Training (Score:2)
but your statement vastly over-trivializes the role of the BIOS in modern machines.
Hey, he doesn't understand it so he assigns it minimal value. There's a Dilbert where the PHB assigns Dilbert 3 minutes to design a world-wide client server architecture.
Re:So why does memory need retraining? (Score:2)
This may sound ignorant, but what exactly what type of re-training does
RAM need with every boot?
Sounds a bit odd to have to retrain memory at all, let alone with each boot....
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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.
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You know, if you translate your brainless hate speech into German, it kinda sounds like Hitler. (Imagine short angry guy with mustache screaming the following)
Sprich für dich, du schwach gewollt, lilly-livered Hündin. Ich hasse Ausländer und Kinder, insbesondere diejenigen, die weinen, sind hungrig und fehlende ihre terroristischen Mütter und Väter, weil sie selbst die Luft gesprengt oder habe sich erschossen oder dich für das Leben für den Versuch zu bringen "Tod Amerika"
So does this mean (Score:2)
the Year of HURD [gnu.org] Desktop is near?
Pendrive Linux? (Score:3)
Acronym clash (Score:1)