Tag: Ricardo Neri

Linux UEFI Validation Project v2.2-rc1 released

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Megha Dey of Intel has taken over the role of LUV maintainer, and announced the 2.2-rc1 release. Excerpts of announcement are below, read full announcement for list of bugfixes.

This is to announce the release of LUV v2.2-rc1. Firstly, I would inform all of you that I have taken over the role of maintainer of this project from Ricardo Neri. I would like to thank Ricardo for all the guidance and support he has provided to make this release possible. This release comes approximately 3 months after our last 2.1-rc2 release and we are further working to have releases more frequently. It mostly includes updates to yocto, meta-oe, various test suites and kernel version. We have also added a new test suite called pstore-test which will run the pstore selftests of the kernel and added some tests in kernel-efi-warnings to detect machine check errors. Given that this is the first time I am doing the release, it is possible for some issues to arise, hence it made sense to have this release as rc1 of v2.2 to allow stabilization towards the next release cycle.

We added a new test suite called pstore-test. This test-suite will check the pstore behavior and are useful to avoid regressions of pstore. This test-suite will cause a reboot during its execution. The necessary groundwork to ensure these type of test suites can be integrated seamlessly into LUV has also been included in this release.

Also, Ricardo added some tests in kernel-efi-warnings to detect machine check errors such as system bus errors, parity errors, cache errors and TLB errors. Linux has support to detect this underlying mechanism and report the error in the kernel message buffer.

We include FWTS V17.09.00 Chipsec 1.3.3 and NDCTL v58, the latest versions available as of this week.

The release images for x86 (disk and network) will be available on 10/23/2017.

 

https://01.org/linux-uefi-validation/v2.2 (apparently this URL won’t be valid until 10/23?)

https://01.org/linux-uefi-validation

Full announcement:
https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/luv

Intel releases LUV (Linux UEFI Validation) v2.1

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Today Ricardo Neri of Intel announced the 2.1 release of LUV. In additon to updating Linux to v4.11, FWTS to V17.06.00, CHIPSEC to v1.3.1, BITS to v2079, and NDCTL v56, they also started doing nightly builds. Here are some of the other highlights of this release, from the announcement:

Gayatri Kammela won the prize of the most active contributor with many bug fixes and a new feature. She fixed our netboot image, which was missing the ramdisk(!). She added support for debugging and logging of BITS output via network. Likewise, she reworked the LUV configuration file to make more sense to both humans and computers by making clear when parameters are not used. She also investigated and fixed dependencies in systemd that caused delays in the execution of tests. Lastly, she fixed a couple of build-time bugs.

Naresh Bhat updated our Linux kernel recipe to retrieve the kernel configuration directly from the source tree rather than manually updating it. This helped us to remove those eyesore patches for updating our configuration that needed to be sent every time we bumped to a new kernel version. The overall result looks great and is closer to the intended use of the kernel and Yocto Projects’s scripts to merge multiple configuration fragments. I took this opportunity to sanitize the configuration for x86 to add missing configurations and reorganize them.

Sai Praneeth Prakhya added functionality to dump relevant and useful dumps as part of the testing results. Now LUV is capable of dumping the kernel’s boot log, the contents of the ACPI tables as well as the properties of the CPUs in the system. Very useful! Also, he helped us to bump to Linux v4.11. He also took burden of rebasing our implementation to detect firmware’s illegal memory access in this new version of Linux.

Matt Hart updated our GRUB configuration to automate boots across all CPU architectures by not waiting for human intervention to complete boots.

See the full announcement for lists of Known and Fixed Issues:
https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/luv

In addition to stuff mentioned in LUV announcement, LUV also did some updates to how LUV calls CHIPSEC, see these posts:
https://lists.01.org/pipermail/chipsec/2017-July/thread.html

These days, LUV-live ships with BIOS MBR or UEFI GPT partition types, local or network boot types, and x86 or x64 architecture type, multiple choices for the image:
https://download.01.org/linux-uefi-validation/v2.1/
https://download.01.org/linux-uefi-validation/v2.1/sha256sums.asc

 

LUV announces v2.1-rc2 release

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Ricardo Neri of Intel posted a LONG announcement about LUV V2.1-rc2, most of which included here. There are a LOT of new features in this LUV release!

This is to announce the release of LUV v2.1-rc2. It has been a while since the last time of our last release. This is not the ideal release cadence are working to make changes. We will now release more frequently. We aim to release a new version every 4-5 weeks with the content we accumulate over that period of time. Given the large number of new features and changes in this release, it made sense to release it as rc2 of v2.1 to allow for issues to arise and stabilize towards the next release cycle.

This release include the client side of our telemetrics solution. This solution is based on the implementation done for Clear Linux[1]; abiding Intel privacy policies[2]. Please note that telemetrics is an opt-in feature and is disabled by default and only works for systems within Intel networks. We will work now on the server side of the solution.

In this release we have migrated from systemV to systemd, which is inline with most Linux distributions. Also, our telemetrics client needed it to function. Megha Dey did all the heavy lifting to migrate to systemd; which was not an easy task (kudos to her!). She worked on stabilizing network and revamping our splash screen, which now uses plymouth.

Sai Praneeth Prakhya extended our existing implementation to detect illegal access to UEFI Boot Services memory regions after boot. His extension now allows to detect such access to also conventional memory. Likewise, it now detects these acceses at runtime and long after UEFI SetVirtualAddressMap. This has been quite useful recently to detect bugs related to UEFI capsules in certain firmware implementations.

Gayatri Kammela worked on providing tools to make the netboot images more useful. She completed a reference implementation of an HTTP server to collect test results in a test farm. The documentation of this implementation can be found here[2]; we don’t provide collection services. Of course, the client-side implementation of this solution is part of this release. Along with this solution, she wrote a script to customize a netboot binary (an EFI application) to work with her reference implementation[4].

Naresh Bhat updated the kernel configuration for aarch64. He also worked on providing a more clean, unified and structured kernel command line for all the supported CPU architectures. He also enabled support of netboot images for aarch64.

Fathi Boudra kindly reworked the kernel configuration fragments to avoid unnecessary duplications.

Matt Hart added a new luv.poweroff option.

Configuration of LUV has been simplified by moving all the parameters that the user might configure a LUV.cfg file found in the boot partition of the disk image. No more meddling with the grub.cfg configuration file.

We now provide images built for both GPT and MBR partition schemes.

Updated test suites: We include FWTS V17.03.00, CHIPSEC v1.2.5 plus all the changes available as of this week towards the release of v.1.2.6, which should be coming soon. BITS was bumped to v2079. We use Linux v4.10. This release is based on the Morty version of the Yocto Project.

meta-oe and updates to the build process: Our build process changed a bit. We now include certain components from the  meta-oe layer[5]. Such layer has been added to our repository, but it still need to be added locally to the build/conf/bblayers.conf file when building.

Binary images for x86: A announcement to download binary images for x86 will be sent this week.

See rest of announcement for list of Known Issues, and Fixed Issues.

[1] https://clearlinux.org/features/telemetry
[2] http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/privacy/intel-privacy.html
[3] https://github.com/01org/luv-yocto/wiki/Send–LUV-test-results-to-an-HTTP-server
[4] https://github.com/01org/luv-yocto/wiki/Using-LUV-Script-modify_luv_netboot_efi.py
[5] https://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/branch/master/layer/meta-oe/

Full announcement:
https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/luv

EFI changes for Linux v4.9

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Matt Fleming sent a message to Linux Kernel/EFI lists with a set of UEFI-centric patches for Linux 4.9. Excerpting his message:

[…]There’s more work on refactoring EFI code to be architecture independent and the largest number of patches is spent cleaning up the EFI memory map code and allowing drivers on x86 to reserve EFI boot services for all of runtime. The architecture independent quest is going pretty well and it was only a couple of lines to get the esrt driver working on arm64. Other than that there’s some cleanups and fixes, and a merge of the out of tree EFI runtime driver from the FWTS project.

 * Refactor the EFI memory map code into architecture neutral files and allow drivers to permanently reserve EFI boot services regions on x86, as well as ARM/arm64 – Matt Fleming
 * Add ARM support for the EFI esrt driver – Ard Biesheuvel
 * Make the EFI runtime services and efivar API interruptible by swapping spinlocks for semaphores – Sylvain Chouleur
 * Provide the EFI identity mapping for kexec which allows kexec to work on SGI/UV platforms with requiring the “noefi” kernel command line parameter – Alex Thorlton
 * Add debugfs node to dump EFI page tables on arm64 – Ard Biesheuvel
 * Merge the EFI test driver being carried out of tree until now in the FWTS project – Ivan Hu
 * Expand the list of flags for classifying EFI regions as “RAM” on arm64 so we align with the UEFI spec – Ard Biesheuvel
 * Optimise out the EFI mixed mode if it’s unsupported (CONFIG_X86_32) or disabled (CONFIG_EFI_MIXED=n) and switch the early EFI boot services function table for direct calls, alleviating us from having to maintain the custom function table – Lukas Wunner
 * Miscellaneous cleanups and fixes
[…]

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mfleming/efi.git tags/efi-next

LUV 2.0 released!

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

The Intel LUV team, at least including: Gayatri Kammela (12), Megha Dey (12), Naresh Bhat (1), and Ricardo Neri (46) have released 2.0 of LUV, the Linux UEFI Validation Project.

These are the highlights of the release:

*Different types of image available (i386 and x86_x64)
*Logging and debugging via network (or serial)
*Tests for persistent memory (NVDIMM)
*Support for i386
*Booting LUV via network (PXE, HTTP boot later)
*Miscellaneous updates (BITS perf improvements, Linux 4.4 kernel, …)
*Dropped support for fido (focus is on Jethro)
*Known issues and limitations (Debugging works only over Ethernet, not WiFi, …)

Read the full announcement, there are pages of details not included here.

One new feature is i386 support. LUV 1.x was x64-centric, now we hopefully also use LUV 2.0 for testing x86 systems! But signed shim is still only available for 64-bit, so Secure Boot is not enabled for 32-bit support [yet?]. Quoting the release notes:  “At the last minute we faced a kernel issue when booting on a i386-based system. We are debugging. Once this is cleared, a bootable image will be uploaded (issue #76 on [3])”

Full announcement:
https://lists.01.org/pipermail/luv/2016-April/001035.html
https://download.01.org/linux-uefi-validation/v2.0
https://download.01.org/linux-uefi-validation/v2.0/sha256_sums.asc
[1]. https://github.com/01org/luv-yocto/tree/master/meta-luv
[2]. https://github.com/pmem/ndctl
[3]. https://github.com/01org/luv-yocto

LUV-live 2.0-RC4 released

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Ricardo Neri of Intel announced Linux UEFI Validation (LUV) v2.0-rc4 release, with lots of changes, new versions of CHIPSEC, BITS, FWTS, and multiple UEFI improvements in LUV. IMO, one of the most important features it that LUV-live’s CHIPSEC should properly log results now! Excerpts from Ricardo’s announcement:

This release touches many areas. Here are some highlights:

Naresh Bhat implemented changes to build from Linus’ tree when building LUV for ARM. While doing this, he got rid of the leg-kernel recipe. Now the kernel is built from linux-yocto-efi-test for all architectures. Also, he took the opportunity to remove some of the LUV-specific changes we had in the meta layer (i.e., our genericarmv8 machine). It always good to restrict ourselves to the meta-luv layer, unless we plan to upstream to the Yocto Project. Now LUV for aarch64 is built using qemuarm64.

It was reported that CHIPSEC was not running correctly in LUV due to missing configuration files and Python modules. This release includes a major rework of CHIPSEC integration into LUV. It ran correctly on all the systems in which we tested. Also, we bumped to v1.2.2; the CHIPSEC latest release.

This release includes new functionality to build BITS from its source rather than just deploying its binaries. BITS is a challenging piece of software when it comes to integration into a bitbake recipe. The build process was broken into several steps. This work help for future work to customize BITS for other CPU architectures and netboot.

The UEFI specification v2.5 includes a Properties Table for the memory map. Under this feature, it is possible to split into separate memory sections the code and data regions of the PE/COFF image. Unfortunately, kernels previous to v4.3 crash if this features is enabled. We have backported a fix pushed to Linux v4.3. We will be bumping the kernel for x86 to 4.3 in our next release.

The EFI stub feature in the kernel allows to run the kernel as an EFI application. Also, it allows the kernel to parse the memory map directly from the firmware rather than taking the map from the bootloader. This is clearly advantageous in case of bugs in the bootloader.

Now that LUV support storing the results of multiple bots, it may happen that disk runs out of space. Gayatri Kammela made updates to increase the size of the results partition and issue a warning when available space runs below 2MB.

Finally, keeping up with the latest changes in the Yocto Project has paid off handsomely. This release is based on Jethro, the latest version of the Yocto Project. Rebasing to this new version as done with very little effort. In the LUV tree you can find the jethro and jethro-next branches; the bases of this release. The fido and fido-next branches are still maintained.

We have bumped the following test suite versions:

 *FTWS is now V15.12.00
 *CHIPSEC is now v1.2.2
 *BITS is 2005

Time to update your LUV-live images! It is a Release Candidate, so please help the LUV team by testing it out and pointing out any issues on the LUV mailing list. This version of CHIPSEC includes VMM tests, so time to test LUV-luv in your virtual machines, not just on bare-metal boxes.

Many people contributed to this release, including: Ricardo Neri, Naresh Bhat, Darren Bilby, Megha Dey, Gayatri Kammela, John Loucaides, Sai Praneeth Prakhya, and Thiebaud Weksteen. It was nice to see the LUV and CHIPSEC teams work together in this release!

More information:
https://lists.01.org/pipermail/luv/2015-December/000745.html
https://download.01.org/linux-uefi-validation/v2.0/luv-live-v2.0-rc4.tar.bz2
https://download.01.org/linux-uefi-validation/v2.0/sha256_sums.asc

https://01.org/linux-uefi-validation/

LUV updated to include CHIPSEC 1.2.2

~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Ricardo Neri of Intel has updated LUV to include the latest CHIPSEC, version 1.2.2!  Excerpt from checkin patch message:

A new version of CHIPSEC has been released. Bump LUV to use such version.

Updating CHIPSEC requires to also update the patches that we apply on top of it. Changes to these patches are not functional; only rebased to 1.2.2.

Finally, take this opportunity to add a PV variable to the recipe.

Full message:
https://lists.01.org/pipermail/luv/2015-November/000687.html

LUV 2.0-RC2 released

~ hucktech ~ 1 Comment

[[ UPDATE: Comment from Ricardo Neri of Intel on the checksums: The checksum file is in the same directory as the source tarball:
https://download.01.org/linux-uefi-validation/v2.0/
https://download.01.org/linux-uefi-validation/v2.0/sha256_sums.asc
I thought I checked there before commenting on this, but I probably missed it. Sorry! ]]

Today Ricardo Neri of the Intel LUV team announced the release of LUV 2.0-RC2 release.

It updates the bits to fresher ones: Yocto Fido, Linux kernel 4.1, FTWS 15.7.0, BITS 1219, and CHIPSEC 1.2.1, as well as improvements in the HTML output of LUV’s test manager. IMO, fresh test suites are reason enough for updates, beyond additional changes, especially CHIPSEC 1.2.1 update…

PS: There was no checksum in the announce email, nor any on the web site which I could find. It would be nice to include that kind of information in future releases.

More Information:
https://download.01.org/linux-uefi-validation/v2.0/luv-live-v2.0-rc2.tar.bz2
http://lists.01.org/pipermail/luv/
https://01.org/linux-uefi-validation