Tag: Josh Triplett

BITS 2073 released

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Burt Triplett has announced the release of BITS (BIOS Implementation Test Suite) version 2073:

– efi: Support EFI_IP4_CONFIG2_PROTOCOL and associated data structures

– _socket: Use EFI_IP4_CONFIG2_PROTOCOL if available, falling back to EFI_IP4_CONFIG_PROTOCOL

 BIOSes based on current versions of EDK2, including current OVMF, only support EFI_IP4_CONFIG2_PROTOCOL, and drop support for EFI_IP4_CONFIG_PROTOCOL.  Support configuring IPv4 via the newer protocol, falling back to the older protocol for compatibility with existing BIOSes.

  In either case, reuse the existing IPv4 configuration if present, and only kick off DHCP if not already configured.  This also allows systems that require manual IPv4 configuration to perform such configuration (via the EFI shell, the BITS Python interpreter, or any other means) and subsequently use that configuration with BITS.

More info:
http://biosbits.org/downloads/bits-2073.zip
https://github.com/biosbits/bits/ (tag bits-2073)
https://lists.01.org/pipermail/bits/2016-January/000001.html

BITS: new network-enabled release (and new mailing list)

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Burt Triplett of Intel has announced the version 2070 release of BITS (BIOS Implementation Test Suite). The main new feature is network support, but also includes new UEFI and ACPI and Python features, better command line features, and other new features. I’ve just excerpted the first paragraph of the networking-centric portion of the announcement below, there are a lot of implementation caveats to read. See the full announcement for the list of features and bugfixes.

Note that there is also a new BITS mailing list, see below URL for ‘first post’ message in the archives:

BITS on EFI now supports TCP networking, using the Python socket module and various modules built atop it.  On EFI systems that provide `EFI_IP4_CONFIG_PROTOCOL` and `EFI_TCP4_SERVICE_BINDING_PROTOCOL`, we implement a `_socket` module in Python with support for TCP sockets over IPv4.  We then include Python’s higher-level socket module that runs on top of `_socket`.

https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/bits
https://lists.01.org/pipermail/bits/2016-January/000000.html
http://biosbits.org/news/bits-2070/
http://biosbits.org/downloads/bits-2070.zip
https://github.com/biosbits/bits

ACPI testing with BITS Python

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Recently, Josh Triplett of Intel gave a talk on using BIOS Interface Test Suite (BITS) at LinuxCon North America.
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-america/program/slides

Demystifying ACPI and EFI via Python and BITS

Click to access bits-with-demo.pdf

BTW, Josh also gave this talk at LinuxConNA’15 as well:

Everything’s a File Descriptor

Click to access fd_0.pdf

I think I’ve mentioned BITS in this blog before. But just in case I’ve not, BITS is a powerful, strange set of BIOS diagnostic tools. BITS started as a BIOS-centric tool, but now includes some UEFI support as well. BITS uses the GRUB boot manager as it’s UI, using GRUB menus for different features, see the screenshots page for a better understanding:
http://biosbits.org/screenshots/

BITS also includes a Python interpreter, so you can do interactive Python, or write scripts to test firmware. BITS has interfaces for BIOS, UEFI, and ACPI data.
http://biosbits.org/scripting/

Jake Edge wrote an excellent follow-up to Josh’s LinuxCON talk, with an article in LWN.net, discussing BITS’s Python for UEFI and ACPI investigations.

In a talk that could easily be seen as a follow-on to his PyCon 2015 talk, Josh Triplett presented at LinuxCon North America on using Python to explore the low-level firmware of today’s systems. The BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) provides an environment that hearkens back to the days of BASIC, PEEK, and POKE, as he demonstrated at PyCon in Montréal in April, but it is much more than that. In Seattle at LinuxCon, he showed that it can also be used to look at and use the EFI and ACPI code in a system—all from Python.

The article is part of LWN.net subscriber-only content, and has been ‘leaked’ (see next URL below), and as the link on the page mentions, an occasional leak isn’t too bad, and helps with subscriptions. If you don’t have a LWN subscription, please think about it, they are probably the best news source for low-level Linux technologies. They have a 1-month free trial.

After reading this article, Laszlo Ersek of Red Hat started up a thread with Josh on the QEMU and UEFI dev mailing lists, with some new ways of thinking about using BITS Python for ACPI testing. Lots of good ideas on this thread, if you care about QEMU, ACPI, AML, or ACPICA tools please read the thread: sorry, I’m too lazy to summarize all of the ACPI nuances in the thread, it’s only a few messages.

Using Python to investigate EFI and ACPI
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.emulators.qemu, gmane.comp.bios.edk2.devel
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/358997

I hope some of the ACPI/AML testing ideas in this thread happen!

More Information:

https://github.com/biosbits/bits