Firmware Test Suite new features for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release

In the last 6 months the Firmware Test Suite (fwts) has seen a lot of development and bug fixing activity in preparation for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty release.  It is timely to give a brief overview of new features and improvements that have landed in this busy development cycle:

UEFI uefidump, additional support for:

• KEK, KEKDefault, PK, PKDefault global variables scan
• db, dbx, dbt variables scan
• messaging device path: add Fibre Channel Ex subtype-21, ATA subtype-18, Fibre Channel Ex subtype-21, USB WWID subtype-16, VLAN subtype-20, Device Logical Unit subtype-17, SAS Ex subtype-22, iSCSI subtype-19, NVM Express namespace subtype-23, Media Protocol subtype-5, PIWG Firmware File subtype-6, PIWG Firmware Volume subtype-7 and extend the Messaging Device Path type Vendor subtype-10.

ACPI related:

• Update to ACPICA version 20140325 
• Add S3 hybrid suspend / resume support with new --s3-hybrid option 
• Improved reporting of errors on ACPI evaluation errors
• New _PLD, _CRS and _PRS dump utilities
• New General Purpose Events (GPE) dump utility
• --disassemble-aml option accepts an output directory argument
• Add DBG2, DBGP, SPCR and MCHI tables to acpidump utility 
• Add -R, --rsdp option to specify the RSDP address
• _IFT, _SRV, _PIC, _UDP, _UPP, _PMM, _MSG, _GAI, _CID, _CDM and _CBA checks added to method test

SMBIOS:

• dmicheck: add more checks for invalid DMI fields

Architecture related:

• Support for i386 amd64 armel armhf aarch64 ppc64 ppc64e.  fwts support for aarch64 was a notable achievement

Kernel Log Scanning:

• Sync klog scanning with 3.13 kernel error messages

Miscellaneous:

• Remove unused LaunchPad bug tagging
• Add Ivybridge and Haswell MSRs to msr test
• Check CPU maximum frequencies

The fwts regression tests have been incorporated into the fwts repository and can be run with "make check". These tests are automatically run at build time to catch regressions.  fwts is now being regularly checked with static code analysis tools smatch, cppcheck and Coverity Scan and this has helped find memory leaks and numerous corner case bugs.  We also exercise fwts with a database of ACPI tables from real hardware and synthetically generated broken tables to check for regressions. 

Contributors to fwts in the current release cycle are (in alphabetical order):  Alex Hung, Colin King, Ivan Hu, Jeffrey Bastian, Keng-Yu Lin, Matt Fleming.  Also, thanks to Naresh Bhat for testing and feedback for the aarch64 port and to Robert Moore for the on-going work with ACPICA.

As ever, all contributions are welcome, including bug reports and feature requests.  Visit the fwts wiki page for more details.