The Linux-Ready Firmware Development Kit

The Linux-Ready Firmware Developer Kit is a useful tool to check if important firmware features on your PC are correct or not.

One can download a live CD which will run the tests without the need to install any software on your machine whatsoever. Alternatively you can grab the source and build it yourself.

To build and run it on my Ubuntu server I first had to install xutils-dev, bison, flex and iasl. I simply downloaded the source tar ball, gunzip and untar'd it and ran make. To run it from the build directory one has run as root and do:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.
./biostest

It runs a bunch of tests, such as checking the ethernet functionality, CPU frequency scaling, fan testing, HPET configuration checking, MTRR and BIOS checks to name but a few. Hopefully with this kit one can determine if a BIOS is configured correctly for Linux before shipping the BIOS on PCs. We can only hope :-)