Zitat

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The Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) provides a bootable pre-OS environment for testing BIOSes and in particular their initialization of Intel processors, hardware, and technologies. BITS can verify your BIOS against many Intel recommendations. In addition, BITS includes Intel's official reference code as provided to BIOS, which you can use to override your BIOS's hardware initialization with a known-good configuration, and then boot an OS.

You might want to use BITS if:
- You're a system or BIOS developer, and you want to validate that your system meets Intel's recommendations.
- You're an OS or application developer building on technologies provided by Intel platforms, and you want to check if your system (or one of your user's systems) has configured those technologies correctly.
- You're an advanced user or developer, and you want to check your BIOS to see if it configures Intel hardware correctly, and if not, to make a stronger case to your BIOS vendor to get it fixed.
- You need to poke hardware in a low-level way, and you need a pre-OS environment to work in to avoid OS interference.

BITS functionality fits in three broad categories:
- Validate: run test suites to verify recommendations
- Configure: override BIOS using Intel reference code
- Explore: experimental tools and information gathering

BITS consists of a modified GRUB2 bootloader, with many additional commands to probe and manipulate hardware configuration, as well as scripts using these commands to test and reconfigure hardware.

The current version of BITS focuses primarily on CPU configuration and power management. BITS supplies general tests and functionality for all Intel x86 platforms, as well as additional specific support for Intel® processors based on the microarchitecture code name Nehalem and newer, which includes Intel Core i7, i5, and i3 desktop and mobile processors, and corresponding Intel Xeon server processors.

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Website/Download

Getting Started for Build 1048 - 01/14/2014

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. For example, you can re-run the power management reference code normally run by your BIOS. 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. These options can help you quickly explore alterative configurations, or override an incorrect BIOS configuration with one that follows Intel's recommendations.

- "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.

To boot BITS, you need to create a bootable BITS disk. You can construct this disk in one of two ways, depending on how you want to use the resulting disk:

- This distribution includes a pre-built .iso image, which you can burn to a CD or image onto a USB disk to produce a bootable BITS disk. This option lets you create bootable BITS media more quickly and easily, but does not allow you to modify the disk after creating it. For more information, refer to the section "Using the pre-constructed read-only BITS disk image".

- If you want to add or edit files in the BITS distribution, upgrade your disk to subsequent versions of BITS more easily, or use a USB disk to store data other than BITS, then you can use the "boot" and optionally "efi" directories in this distribution to construct a bootable USB disk which supports subsequent modification. For this procedure, refer to the section "Constructing a bootable BITS USB disk supporting subsequent modification".

Using the pre-constructed read-only BITS disk image

This distribution includes a pre-built .iso image. You can burn this image onto a CD using any standard CD burning software for your platform. Please note that you need to burn the .iso as an image; you should end up with a CD containing directories named "boot" and "efi", not a CD containing the .iso file.

Thanks to deep magic provided by GRUB, the same .iso file also works as a bootable USB disk image. If you image the .iso file directly to a USB disk (the whole disk, not a partition), you'll end up with a bootable USB disk. On Linux, try "dd if=bits-NNN.iso of=/dev/sdX"; replace bits-NNN.iso with the versioned BITS iso, and sdX with your disk device, and remember to umount it first. On Windows, you might try "dd for Windows". In both cases, make sure you refer to the correct disk device for your USB disk, not your system's hard disk. Note that this procedure will overwrite any data on your USB disk. Also note that this constructs a USB disk containing an ISO9660 filesystem as a partition, which operating systems do not normally expect to see; you might have some trouble reading it from within your OS, and you definitely cannot write to it.

If you want to try out BITS within a virtual machine, you can tell your VM to use the .iso file either as a disk image or a CD image. For KVM, you can run "kvm -cdrom bits-NNN.iso" to boot BITS via CD. Note that most hardware-specific tests will not run in a virtual machine, but some of the general tests will work. If you find out interesting things about either BITS or your VM in the process, we'd love to hear about it.

Constructing a bootable BITS USB disk supporting subsequent modification

This procedure creates a bootable USB disk. You will need a USB disk with a reasonable amount of space (enough to hold the boot directory present in this distribution, plus a little slack space). Your USB disk should have a FAT32 partition.

If your USB disk contains any data that you care about, back it up now. No really. There will be a test later.

Note that if you have previously followed this procedure to create a bootable BITS USB disk, you can upgrade to a new version of BITS by deleting the "boot" directory from the root of the USB disk and copying the "boot" directory from this BITS .zip distribution to the root of the USB disk. You must delete the old directory first; copying the new directory over the old will not remove obsolete files, and will thus break in subtle ways. If this procedure works for you, you don't need to follow the remaining steps in this section; if you Need to construct a new BITS USB disk, read on.

Make sure you know the correct device name for your USB disk, so you don't write to your system's hard disk instead.

Go get syslinux from <http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/>;, or install the package provided by your Linux distribution; download the latest version and extract it somewhere you can find from the command line. The syslinux distribution includes binaries for various platforms, including Linux, Windows, and DOS.

The remaining instructions will require a command prompt; open one, and cd to this directory (containing this INSTALL.txt file and the boot directory). Under Windows, when the commands below refer to a program, you will need to give the path to the executable, wherever you extracted it.

To build a bootable USB disk, you will need a USB disk with a FAT32 partition. A partitionless USB disk with no partition table and a FAT32 filesystem directly on the disk, sometimes called a "superfloppy", will *not* work. If you have such a disk, you must partition it so that it has a partition table and a FAT32 partition. For Linux, try gparted. For Windows, the "HP USB disk storage format tool" can do this; you can find that tool at <http://downloads.pcworld.com/pub/new/uti.../SP27608.exe>;. Run it, choose your USB disk (the tool should not let you choose your system hard disk), and choose "FAT32". The volume label does not matter. Do not check "Create a DOS startup disk"; this procedure will make the disk bootable, but it will boot something *much* more awesome than DOS.

Now, copy the "boot" and "efi" directories to the root of that drive.

For Windows, run:
xcopy /s boot u:\boot\
xcopy /s efi u:\efi\
Change "u:" to the drive letter of your USB disk.

For Linux, run:
cp -r boot efi /media/disk/
Change /media/disk to the mount point of your USB disk.

Now, you need to make the disk bootable with syslinux.

For Windows, run:
syslinux.exe -m -a u:
Change "syslinux.exe" to the path to the syslinux executable for your platform, and "u:" to the drive letter of your USB disk

For Linux, run:
syslinux /dev/sdb1
Change "/dev/sdb1" to the device name of the partition on your USB disk. Take care not to syslinux your system hard disk. You will also need to set the boot flag on the partition containing BITS; gparted can do that. Finally, you Need to install an MBR that will boot the bootable partition; the syslinux package includes an "mbr.bin" which will work. To install that MBR to the USB disk, run: cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdb
Change /dev/sdb to the device name of your USB disk, Note that your syslinux distribution may install mbr.bin somewhere else.

The resulting disk will boot via USB on systems booting via MBR or via the compatibility support module (CSM) of an EFI BIOS. It will also boot natively on many 32-bit and 64-bit EFI BIOSes; however, some EFI BIOSes may require the partition containing the "efi" directory to have partition type 0xef rather than one of the usual FAT32 types such as 0x0c. If you have such an EFI BIOS, you may need to change the type of the partition to 0xef before your BIOS will boot from it; note that this will also prevent Windows from assigning a drive letter to that partition by default.

@Fernando

Zitat von Fernando im Beitrag #3

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Which are your own experiences with this tool?

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Zitat von Fernando im Beitrag #3

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For whom do you recommend to use this tool?

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Hello,
Helppppppp
I burn BITS image to USB key by the DD command
when i boot my system in this USB KEY and i see just "GRUB" word in my screen. THERE IS NO MENU (nothing).
Note that i fololow all steps in BITS tutoriel (README.TXT and INSTALL.txt).

FYI : CPU intel core i3-5010U 2.10 GHz
Can you help me please

EDIT by Fernando: Post title replaced by the thread title