Use UEFI Shell Script to Automatically Test Your UEFI Module

We know that test program is very import for developing software components. It is not only for QA staff, but also for ourselves programmer to program quickly and to be quality.

Software developing is actually a serial of automatic processes. Code is an automatic process run by computer. It is more fast and exact than human brain. that is why a computer was developed to encrypt and decrypt messages. Test is a process we can do it automatically to reduce our effort and assurance the quality of software product. Design is a process, but we only design with our brain now. Maybe design will be delivered by a computer in the future. Programming is a process that is also be written by programmers, but Hollywood movies show us code can update itself.

This page focus on automatically testing UEFI module with UEFI shell script.

The idea is very simple. For example, we want to use a smart way to erase data on flash ROM with size in 4096-byte alignment. Flash ROM supports the following commands to erase data:

4K-Erase: Erasing data in 4K bytes
32K-Erase: Erasing data in 32k bytes
64K-Erase: Erasing data in 64k bytes

The performance is bad if we only use 4K-Erase command to erase large data. For example, To erase data with 1024K, we send 256 commands of 4K-Erase. If we use 64K-Erase command, we only sends 16 commands. We cannot always use 64K-Erase command because it is only be used in 64K alignment.

For example, if we want to erase 548K data at 100K offset, we only use the following 14 commands of 4K-Erase, 32K-Erase, and 64K-Erase.

100K Offset, 4K-Erase
104K Offset, 4K-Erase
108K Offset, 4K-Erase
112K Offset, 4K-Erase
116K Offset, 4K-Erase
120K Offset, 4K-Erase
128K Offset, 64K-Erase
192K Offset, 64K-Erase
256K Offset, 64K-Erase
320K Offset, 64K-Erase
384K Offset, 64K-Erase
448K Offset, 64K-Erase
512K Offset, 32K-Erase
544K Offset, 4K-Erase

We define the SmartFlashErase() for this requirement.

EFI_STATIS
EFIAPI
SmartFlashErase (
  IN UINT64 Offset
  IN UINT32 Size
  );

Our test program is SmartFlashEraseTest.efi with the following usage.

SmartFlashEraseTest.efi -offset offset -size -size

Out test script is SmartFlashEraseTest.nsh as below.

@echo [Case]
SmartFlashEraseTest.efi -offset 100k -size 548k
@if not %LastError% == 0 then
  @echo [Error] LastError = %LastError%
  goto exit
@endif
@echo [CheckPoint] Status = 0 (Success)

:exit

We can use redirect the NSH to a log file.
SmarFlashEraseTest.nsh > Case.log

The log file contains tags, [Case], [Error], [CheckPoint]. We can write a python program to analyze these tags. I'll write another page for this topic.

This way not only for UEFI shell, any environment that supports script can use the way to automatically test our software components.

-Count