Finally, even firmware developers with no Ubuntu or Linux experience can test and validate their BIOS or EFI on Ubuntu and Linux. Introducing the Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit. This open source project was created by Intel developers using Ubuntu for development and validation.

The main goal is for the kit to verify that important platform features are supported on Linux via the firmware, and that there are no "known bad bugs" in the firmware of a machine. By verifying these platform features and checking for known bad issues, we hope to improve the experience of Linux users by preventing interactions between Linux and the firmware on production systems. The kit simply consists of a bootable CD (the ISO is available from the official site www.linuxfirmwarekit.org.

When this CD boots, the Linux kernel, of your choice, starts and launches the test application. This application performs a set of automated tests and then reports the results for interactive inspection and saving. Of course, the kit can also run in fully-automatic mode, great for those who want to verify on multiple machines over a network, or for those who just don't like manual work. The test application can also assist you in running some of the non-automated firmware tests such as hardware pokes, lmbench, etc.

The idea is that you, as an Ubuntu user, a firmware developer, validation team, or kernel developer, use this CD to run the tests against your firmware and Linux kernel.