Re: [PATCH 00/12] Introduce new acpi/smbios qtests using biosbits

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 02:03:15PM +0530, Ani Sinha wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 1:39 PM Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> 
> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Jun 27, 2022 at 12:58:44PM +0530, Ani Sinha wrote:
> > > Biosbits is a software written by Josh Triplett that can be downloaded by
> > > visiting https://biosbits.org/. The github codebase can be found here:
> > > https://github.com/biosbits/bits/tree/master. It is a software that 
> > > exercizes
> > > the bios components such as acpi and smbios tables directly through acpica
> > > bios interpreter (a freely available C based library written by Intel,
> > > downloadable from https://acpica.org/ and is included with biosbits) 
> > > without an
> > > operating system getting involved in between.
> > > There are several advantages to directly testing the bios in a real 
> > > physical
> > > machine or VM as opposed to indirectly discovering bios issues through the
> > > operating system. For one thing, the OSes tend to hide bios problems from 
> > > the
> > > end user. The other is that we have more control of what we wanted to test
> > > and how by directly using acpica interpreter on top of the bios on a 
> > > running
> > > system. More details on the inspiration for developing biosbits and its 
> > > real
> > > life uses can be found in (a) and (b).
> > > This patchset contains QEMU qtests written in python that exercizes the 
> > > QEMU
> > > bios components using biosbits and reports test failures.
> > >
> > > Details of each of the files added by this patchset are provided in the 
> > > README
> > > file which is part of Patch 11. Every effort to contact Josh, through 
> > > various
> > > means including email, twitter, linkedIn etc has failed. Hence, the 
> > > changes to
> > > build biosbits with the newer compiler, upgrade acpica and other changes 
> > > are
> > > currently maintained in a forked project in my personal github. We may 
> > > want to
> > > maintain bits in a separate fork in a stable repository that is 
> > > accessible by
> > > QEMU developers.
> > >
> > > The newly introduced qtest currently only run for x86_64 platform. They 
> > > pass
> > > both when running make check on a baremetal box as well as from inside a 
> > > vm.
> > >
> > > Thanks to Igor M for pointing me to this work.
> > >
> > > (a) 
> > > https://blog.linuxplumbersconf.org/2011/ocw/system/presentations/867/original/bits.pdf
> > > (b) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36QIepyUuhg
> > >
> > > Ani Sinha (12):
> > >   qtest: meson.build changes required to integrate python based qtests
> > >   acpi/tests/bits: add prebuilt bios bits zip archive
> > >   acpi/tests/bits: add prebuilt bits generated grub modules and scripts
> >
> > These two files didn't arrive on the mailing list, presumaby because
> > pre-built binaries made the patches way too large.
> 
> Yes they are over 25 MB and my gmail account does not support
> attachments more than that size.

Ok, with that kind of size, it is definitely not something we want to
be committing to git either, nor consuming via a submodule since the
latter would bloat the release tarballs too.

With regards,
Daniel
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