[NEWS] Release 3 is here!
The Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit team is pleased to announce Release 3 of the kit. The project is fairly stable at this point, but there are still many new, exciting additions to the kit such as Linux PowerTop 1.8, a tool to monitor power usage, c-states and p-states. See http://www.linuxpowertop.org/ for more info. The default kernels that are tested by the kit are also updated to now include: kernel.org 2.6.22-9, FC6, Ubuntu 7.04 and Mandriva 2007.1. There are also changes to make it as simple as possible to build your own customized firmwarekit to include the kernels _you_ care about. Corresponding documentation is, of course, included. See 'HOWTO_CustomizeISO.txt' for easy instructions.
For a full list of new tests, enhancements and bug-fixes, check out our release notes, and download Release 3 now!
What is the Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit?
The Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit is a tool to test how well Linux works together with the firmware (BIOS or EFI) of your machine. The main component of the kit is a bootable CD, which you can download from this site. When this CD boots, the Linux kernel starts and launches the test application. This application performs a set of tests on your machine and then reports the results for interactive inspection. The test application also assists you in running some of the non-automatic parts of a firmware test plan. The idea is that you, as a firmware developer, validation team, or kernel developer, use this CD to run the tests against your firmware and Linux kernel.User note
The Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit is primarily aimed at firmware developers, and as such is sometimes very picky about the firmware (BIOS or EFI) When the kit says FAIL, this does not mean that your machine is defective. Specifically, there is no reason to call your vendor's support department; your machine is likely to function fine.Our goal for the kit is that it is used to verify that the important platform features are supported on Linux via the firmware, and that there are no "known bad bugs" in the firmware of a machine. By verifying these platform features and checking for known bad issues, we hope to improve the experience of Linux users by preventing interactions between Linux and the firmware on production systems. We at the Intel Open Source Technology Center are proud to deliver the Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit, and we hope that system vendors use our software to test Linux interoperability with the firmware on their systems.