[needs-packaging] bits

[Pander]

Name: bits

Short description: BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) offering bootable testing of BIOS

Description: The Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) provides a bootable pre-OS environment for testing BIOSes and in particular their initialization of Intel processors, hardware, and technologies. BITS can verify your BIOS against many Intel recommendations. In addition, BITS includes Intel's official reference code as provided to BIOS, which you can use to override your BIOS's hardware initialization with a known-good configuration, and then boot an OS.

BITS functionality fits in three broad categories:
    * Validate: run test suites to verify recommendations
    * Configure: override BIOS using Intel reference code
    * Explore: experimental tools and information gathering

BITS consists of a modified GRUB2 bootloader, with many additional commands to probe and manipulate hardware configuration, as well as scripts using these commands to test and reconfigure hardware.

The current version of BITS focuses primarily on CPU configuration and power management. BITS supplies general tests and functionality for all Intel x86 platforms, as well as additional specific support for Intel® processors based on the microarchitecture code name Nehalem and newer, which includes Intel Core i7, i5, and i3 desktop and mobile processors, and corresponding Intel Xeon server processors.

License: BITS Open Source license and GPL for grub

URL: http://biosbits.org/

Justification: Packaging this and shipping it with Ubuntu installation would be a valuable addition to hardware testing such as the bootable memtest already is.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

*** This is an automated message ***

This bug is tagged needs-packaging which identifies it as a request for a new package in Ubuntu. As a part of the managing needs-packaging bug reports specification, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Specs/NeedsPackagingBugs, all needs-packaging bug reports have Wishlist importance. Subsequently, I'm setting this bug's status to Wishlist.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.