BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS)Build ID: @@BUILDID@@ Build number: @@BUILDNUM@@
Please send any bug reports, patches, or other mail about BITS to the BITS mailing list, bits@lists.01.org, and please include the build ID for reference.
You can find the BITS homepage at http://biosbits.org/
None of the menu options provided by this toolkit should affect your system permanently, only for the current boot. If you ever find that this toolkit affects your system in any permanent way, that represents a serious bug. However, poking around at the GRUB command line may turn up some commands provided by GRUB that can affect your system; if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
This README.txt file documents how to use BITS.
For instructions to build a bootable USB disk from a BITS binary distribution, refer to INSTALL.txt included in the top-level directory of that that binary distribution.
For more detailed documentation on specific components of BITS, see the files in the Documentation directory.
If you want to do BITS development, start with the BITS source code; on a BITS USB disk built from this version of BITS, you can find the source code under /boot/src/bits-@@BUILDNUM@@.tar.gz; for more information, see README.Developers.txt in the BITS source.
BITS has two modes of operation: an interactive mode that provides a menu of available functionality, and a batch mode that automatically runs operations such as the testsuite or structure decoding and saves a log of the results without any user interaction. By default, BITS runs in interactive mode. To configure batch mode, edit the configuration file /boot/bits-cfg.txt and set the batch option to include one or more batch operations.
BITS will detect your processor signature and enable appropriate menu options for your CPU and general CPU family. For instance, if you have a Westmere processor, you will see menu options specific to the Westmere processor, menu options for the Nehalem family of processors, and menu options for all Intel processors.
The available options in BITS fall into several broad categories:
"Test Menu" contains various test suites designed to test your system and its BIOS configuration. When run normally, these test suites will produce a list of all test failures, and a summary of the tests run. Tests that pass will generate no output, and if the entire test suite passes, you will see only the summary at the end. If you want to see more verbose failure information from each test, you can set the verbosity level via the "test_options" command from the GRUB command line. If you turn it up high enough it will show tests that pass, but that will quickly drown out the useful information about test failures; apart from the novelty of seeing how many tests BITS includes, this serves little useful purpose. Turn it back off and get back to fixing bugs. :)
"Configure Menu" contains options to temporarily reconfigure your system. None of these options will touch your BIOS or permanently change your system configuration, but they will override that configuration for the current boot only.
"Explore Menu" contains options that let you explore your system's existing configuration and behavior, as well as experimental tests which produce results beyond just PASS/FAIL. For example, you can explore the latency incurred to wake CPUs from deeper C-states.
"View and Save Log" contains options to review the log of BITS test results, clear the log, or save the log to /boot/bits-log.txt.
"Boot an OS from disk" provides options that allow you to boot your existing operating system from a hard disk. You can use these options to test OS behavior after running options from the Configure menu to change your system's configuration; for instance, after running Intel's power management reference code to overwrite your BIOS's power management configuration, you could boot Linux and run powertop, or boot your own test workload and run benchmarks.
Authors: Burt Triplett burt@pbjtriplett.org Josh Triplett josh@joshtriplett.org
Based on: GNU GRUB2 - https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ Python - https://www.python.org/ ACPICA - https://acpica.org/ fdlibm - http://www.netlib.org/fdlibm/
For more details, see README.Developers.txt