What's new in the Firmware Test Suite for Oneiric 11.10?

The Firmware Test Suite (fwts) is still a relatively new tool and hence this cycle I've still been adding some features and fixing bugs.  I've been running fwts against large data sets to soak test the tool to catch a lot of stupid corner cases (e.g. broken ACPI tables). Also, I am focused on getting some better documentation written (this is still "work in progress").

New tests for the Oneiric 11.10 release are as follows:

mpcheck:
    Sanity check tables against the MultiProcessor Specification (MPS). For more information about MPS, see the wikipedia MPS page.

mpdump:
    Dump annotated MPS tables.

msr:
    Sanity check Model Specific Registers across all CPUs. Does some form of MSR default field sanity checking.

s3power:
    Very simple suspend (S3) power checks.  This puts the machine into suspend and attempts to measure the power consumed while suspended. Generally this test gives more accurate results the longer one suspends the machine.  Your mileage may vary on this test.

ebdadump:
     Hex dump of the Extended BIOS Data Area.

In addition to the above, the fwts "method" test is now expanded to evaluate and exercise over 90 ACPI objects and methods.

One can also join the fwts mailing list by going to the project page and subscribing.