Author Topic: New Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite  (Read 8439 times)

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uman

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New Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite
« on: February 26, 2011, 02:59:41 PM »
Hi, I posted this link in a thread on wrmsr, but it should be of general interest:

Intel just released the Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS), at http://biosbits.org/

Here's the info, copied for your reference:

The Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) provides a bootable pre-OS environment for testing BIOSes and in particular their initialization of Intel processors, hardware, and technologies. BITS can verify your BIOS against many Intel recommendations. In addition, BITS includes Intel's official reference code as provided to BIOS, which you can use to override your BIOS's hardware initialization with a known-good configuration, and then boot an OS.

BITS functionality fits in three broad categories:

Validate: run test suites to verify recommendations
Configure: override BIOS using Intel reference code
Explore: experimental tools and information gathering
BITS consists of a modified GRUB2 bootloader, with many additional commands to probe and manipulate hardware configuration, as well as scripts using these commands to test and reconfigure hardware.

The current version of BITS focuses primarily on CPU configuration and power management. BITS supplies general tests and functionality for all Intel x86 platforms, as well as additional specific support for IntelĀ® processors based on the microarchitecture code name Nehalem and newer, which includes Intel Core i7, i5, and i3 desktop and mobile processors, and corresponding Intel Xeon server processors.