Testing firmware the devops way

ITRenew is selling recertified OCP servers under the Sesame brand, those servers come either with their original UEFI BIOS or with LinuxBoot. The LinuxBoot project is pushing the Linux  kernel inside bios flash and using userland programs as bootloader.

To achieve quality on our software stack, as any project, we need to test it. Traditional BIOS are tested by hand, this is 2019 we need to do it automatically! We already presented the  hardware setup behind the LinuxBoot CI, this talk will focus on the software.

We use u-root for our userland bootloader; this software is written in Go so we naturally choose to use Go for our testing too. We will present how we are using and extending the Go native test framework `go test` for testing embedded systems (serial console) and improving the report format for integration to a CI.