Andrea Barberio

We talked extensively about LinuxBoot, a Linux-based environment intended to be integrated into the firmware on the boot ROM. This time we want to talk about how do we test LinuxBoot before it goes to production. We will talk about ConTest, an open-source continuous and on-demand system testing framework that we designed to be modular, validating, and infrastructure-agnostic, and how it is helping us validate open source firmware on our datacenter platforms.

With LinuxBoot we became vendors of our own system firmware. In order to go to production we need a reliable quality assurance process, and firmware testing was a necessity. In this talk we are presenting ConTest (short for Continuous Testing), a modular framework aimed at automating system testing workflows, like firmware validation and provisioning. ConTest has several goals in mind: being open source and community-driven; validate as much as possible at compile time and at job submission time, to minimize unnecessary operations and run-time failures; being lightweight and infrastructure-agnostic, so it can run in Facebook’s datacenters as well as on a Raspberry Pi; being composable, thanks to an interface-and-plugins architecture; being user-oriented so that it’s not necessary to know the internals to use it effectively; and being metrics and events driven, so that users can gain valuable insights about their jobs, more than just success rate (e.g. micro-benchmarking and trend analysis).

ConTest is aimed at anyone who need to automate system-level testing. Various plugins are provided out of the box, with examples on how to use them. The users can combine them like building blocks using a simple job description format based on JSON, and test scenarios of variable complexity. When default plugins are not enough, for example in order to talk to a custom service, users can develop new plugins, and plug them just like if they were part of the core framework. Open-sourcing your own plugins is always appreciated!

Other people: Marco Guerri

LinuxBoot is an embedded Linux-based environment intended to be integrated into the firmware on the boot ROM. It provides an open, reliable way of initializing hardware and booting a target operating system. It can even replace large portions of proprietary and closed firmware on existing systems. We are experimenting with it at Facebook for speed, reliability, flexibility, transparency and control, and the goal is to make it available on as many platforms as possible.

UEFI was introduced about two decades ago to address the growing complexity of booting a modern computer. It has evolved over the years and is now almost ubiquitous. However there are some parts which still seem limited and difficult to work with, and most vendor implementations are still closed source.

LinuxBoot, an open source effort, offers a solution by embedding a Linux kernel into a machine's firmware and using Linux to initialize most of the hardware and boot the target OS. The idea is to build on top of core silicon initialization modules (e.g. from UEFI) and get into into Linux as early as possible. We are experimenting with LinuxBoot in our infrastructure and various hardware projects at Facebook. We will talk about the advantages of running LinuxBoot for reliability, speed and flexibility, debugging, and how you can try it today on accessible hardware.

Other people: David Hendricks

We will talk about the open source system firmware development that is going on at Facebook. We will discuss the reasons behind working on open source firmware, and why we chose LinuxBoot as our firmware platform of choice. We will also show systemboot, a "distribution" for open source bootloaders based on u-root, and how this fits together with coreboot and LinuxBoot.

Other people: David Hendricks