fwts-live

Overview

fwts-live is a bootable USB image that will automatically boot and run the Firmware Test Suite on both legacy BIOS as well as native UEFI Firmware (x86_64 only). The test results are stored on the USB device and can be analysed on the fly or later on another computer.

Have a look at a quick demo of fwts-live booting and executing tests within QEMU

Preparation

1. Download the image from http://fwts.ubuntu.com/fwts-live/

2. Verify the downloaded image's checksum to make sure the image is intact.

3. Insert a USB stick into your machine, and unmount it.

4. Copy the live image to the USB stick, you can find out the device using:

    $ dmesg | tail -10 | grep Attached
      [ 9705.954616] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

... in the above example it is /dev/sdb

And copy the image to the USB stick. For example, for the image fwts-live-15.12.00.img we use:

    $ sudo dd if=fwts-live-15.12.00.img of=/dev/sdb && sync

5. Remove the USB stick.

Windows

If you are using Windows, you may use "Win32 Disk Imager" to copy the live image to a USB stick.

Running the live image

Insert the USB stick into the machine you want to test and boot the machine. You may need to modify the BIOS settings to boot from the USB stick. You will see the following boot screen, wait a few moments and the boot will proceed.

After a while, you will be presented with the following screen:

You may chose to either run all the fwts batch tests, or select individual tests to run, or abort testing altogether. To navigate the menu press the cursor up/down keys and press the space key to toggle the selection. Press the enter key to confirm the selection.

Running all the batch tests

The "All Batch Tests" option will make fwts run all the batch tests automatically. This is the simplest and easiest way of using this tool. It will take few minutes to run through all the tests.

After selecting the "All Batch Tests" from the menu, the tests will start and you will see a progress dialog box:

and once the tests are all complete, you can opt to view the results log:

one can then look at the results log by pressing enter to select < Yes > and you will then be presented with a view of the results log:

You can navigate up/down using the cursor up/down and page up/down keys. Also one can scroll left/right using the cursor left/right keys. Press the enter key to select the < EXIT > button and exit the log viewer.

The tests are now complete and you will be see the following dialog box that will inform you the path name to the results.log on the USB stick and you can then press enter to shutdown the machine.

So, in the above example, if you later plug the USB stick into Ubuntu, you will find the results in /media/OEM_BUILD/fwts/11102011/1327/results.log. On a Windows machine, if this USB stick is mounted on drive D: you would find the log in D:\fwts\11102011\1327\results.log

Note that on each run of fwts-live, an HTML based report is generated and placed in the fwts directory. For example: /media/OEM_BUILD/fwts/results.html or D:\fwts\results.html. This is achieved by using the Firmware Test Suite's --log-type option. Each time you run fwts-live, the plaintext file will be preserved, however only the most recent run of fwts-live will preserve the HTML report.

See an example of the HTML report here.

Running individual tests

The "Select Individual Tests" option will allow you to select specific fwts tests. Once selected you will be presented with a scrollable menu of the available tests to run:

To navigate the menu press the cursor up/down keys and press the space key to toggle the selections. Press the enter key to run the test(s). You may select one or more tests.

You will then see a progress dialog box and then the option to see the results log, as described in the "Running all the batch tests" section above.

Interpreting the Results

The FWTS reference guide describes in detail each test and the errors that the test may find. Alternatively, the results.log can be copied from the USB stick and sent to Canonical for an engineer to analyse and diagnose any faults that need fixing in the firmware or attached to a new bug within the FWTS Live Launchpad Project.