Automated Verification of Configuration Features for Pre-OS (Firmware)

Abstract

An Integrated Firmware Image consists of various system firmware with multiple feature configuration per silicon architecture. There are multiple issues that need to be addressed such as automating the build and sanity verification, verify and validate all various configurations of the features that are included for the system. This thesis aims on creating a tool chain which will build an automated integrated image and identify, verify and validate all various configurations variable, value pairs. Build the tree of child-parent relationship, impact on the silicon/system in various aspects like power, thermal, performance, feature availability and in different state machine. This consists of many stages like image verification, pre-packing, build, verification, post -build and release with rollback feature. Each stage has predefined tasks; image verification has to verify payload size, updating intermediate configuration files; pre-packing has to re-create the previous build for incremental and delta build setup, updating all intermediate configuration files. Once all the configuration details are set, all the payloads are integrated, and the build will be triggered to generate various different configurations for silicon. The generated images with all the different configurations are then verified and debugged in the shell environment once the platform is powered up with all the configuration that is enabled for the silicon. Next step is to check whether controllers is behaving as the system should respond. Then find the dependencies between various Configurations. Hence, to ease the verification analysis in the process and to improvise build environment, automation tool suite is used for the verification of all the configuration features. Tool chain is developed keeping in mind the configurability of covering all possible configuration or user subset as needed at various stages of the program development. This caters to various divisions of Intel to stream line the configuration data and how it gets organized.