fwts corrupts RTC wakealarm time on wakealarm test

[Peter D.]

Running "sudo fwts --all" causes a UEFI variable (wakealarm) to be changed, and possibly others as well.

In this case /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm was set to be noon tomorrow, fwts was run, and then wakealarm was found to have been changed. Obviously it had been used during the test, but a warning should have been issued. Better yet, old values could have been stored in a file and then automatically restored on the reboot.

The test system was Xubuntu Xenial 16.04 alpha (actually daily spin from early January).

Also, fwts reported 71 failures, presumably most of those are caused by American Megatrends or by Asrock and Ubuntu is unable to fix them. Is there anyone in the community that I should send the results log to?

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

The wakealarm test is resetting the RTC, so yes, we should restore the state of this. I'll get a fix done for the next fwts release in February.

Generally, once a machine is released it is hard to get the BIOS fixed. fwts is mainly useful to catch BIOS issues before a machine goes into production and/or for finding possible reasons why certain machine functionality is not working. So, the errors you find are hard to fix.

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

Fix sent to fwts-devel mailing list for review and inclusion into next release of fwts:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/fwts-devel/2016-January/007304.html

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

Fix committed: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/hwe/fwts.git/commit/?id=69d1497525100a0c0da6ac88ccad685cee4c8ac7