Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) Overview

Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) Overview

The BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) provides a bootable pre-OS environment for testing BIOSes and initialization of Intel® processors, hardware, and technologies. BITS verifies your BIOS against many recommendations and includes Intel's official reference code as provided to BIOS, which can be used to override BIOS hardware initialization with a known good configuration, and then boot an OS.

Use BITS if:
1. You're a system or BIOS developer, and you want to validate that your system meets Intel's recommendations.
2. You're an OS or application developer building on technologies provided by Intel platforms, and you want to check if your system (or one of your user's systems) has configured those technologies correctly.
3. You're an advanced user or developer, and you want to check your BIOS to see if it configures Intel hardware correctly, and if not, to make a stronger case to your BIOS vendor to get it fixed.
4. You need to poke hardware in a low-level way, and you need a pre-OS environment to avoid OS interference.

BITS functionality fits into three broad categories:
1. Validate: run test suites to verify recommendations.
2. Configure: override BIOS using Intel reference code.
3. 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.

So it seems this software can be used to see if your Intel BIOS software is up to date, correctly configured according to recommendations and even can apply a known good configuration eg. if your firmware became corrupted. But note it is likely to overwrite the existing BIOS settings so be warned. You'd likely only use this if your BIOS firmware was corrupted.

See https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000020974/processors.html

#BIOS #intel

BIOS Implementation Test Suite Overview
Defines uses and functionality of the BIOS Implementation Test Suite.


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