ULT tools and Libraries for Intel Platforms

Abstract

Unit level testing in driver development is one of the most crucial part. Through unit level testing, developer can know basic faults in his code. Because of this testing, developer can avoid small but disastrous mistakes. On the other hand, if this faulty (without doing unit level testing) code is passed for validation cycle, lots of man hours and resources are wasted. The other part of this project is doing register operations effectively. Register operations (like reading, writing and comparing) in driver development are small but most crucial parts. In lower level driver in linux, one of developer’s job is to configure specific hardware registers in particular way to make hardware working properly. On the other side, validation or debug engineer needs to check register status in order to validate or debug various scenarios. In some scenarios, engineer needs to check whole platform dump so that he can find root cause of problem or understand that whether driver is working in proper manner or not.

In this project, main focus is on how to design and implement unit level testing tools which can detect maximum faults in code before going to validation cycle. Two tools are designed to check whether BIOS is properly parsed and values are properly applied to registers. Backlight control is designed to check proper kernel programming for backlight and Split screen checks for flickers and proper FIFO buffer programming. For effective register operations, main focus is on how to do these operations through application layer so that user can have better experience. Also, register parser tool is developed in such a manner that it can be used on various hardware platforms without extra efforts. Using this tool, various operations like reading, writing, comparing can be performed by the user. Register dump (all-important register of platform) is one of the important feature of this tool which gives debug information of all important registers of the platform. By this, user does not need to read what every bit does from platform specific document. This tool also gives facility of saving all the results so that they can be used for future reference or can be sent to code owner for corrections.