ACPICA version 20100331 released

[Moore, Robert]

31 March 2010. Summary of changes for version 20100331:

This release is available at www.acpica.org/downloads

1) ACPI CA Core Subsystem:

Completed a major update for the GPE support in order to improve support for shared GPEs and to simplify both host OS and ACPICA code. Added a reference count mechanism to support shared GPEs that require multiple device drivers. Several external interfaces have changed. One external interface has been removed. One new external interface was added. Most of the GPE external interfaces now use the GPE spinlock instead of the events mutex (and the Flags parameter for many GPE interfaces has been removed.) See the updated ACPICA Programmer Reference for details. Matthew Garrett, Bob Moore, Rafael Wysocki. ACPICA BZ 831.

Changed:
    AcpiEnableGpe, AcpiDisableGpe, AcpiClearGpe, AcpiGetGpeStatus
Removed:
    AcpiSetGpeType
New:
    AcpiSetGpe

Implemented write support for DataTable operation regions. These regions are defined via the DataTableRegion() operator. Previously, only read support was implemented. The ACPI specification allows DataTableRegions to be read/write, however.

Implemented a new subsystem option to force a copy of the DSDT to local memory. Optionally copy the entire DSDT to local memory (instead of simply mapping it.) There are some (albeit very rare) BIOSs that corrupt or replace the original DSDT, creating the need for this option. Default is FALSE, do not copy the DSDT.

Implemented detection of a corrupted or replaced DSDT. This change adds support to detect a DSDT that has been corrupted and/or replaced from outside the OS (by firmware). This is typically catastrophic for the system, but has been seen on some machines. Once this problem has been detected, the DSDT copy option can be enabled via system configuration. Lin Ming, Bob Moore.

Fixed two problems with AcpiReallocateRootTable during the root table copy. When copying the root table to the new allocation, the length used was incorrect. The new size was used instead of the current table size, meaning too much data was copied. Also, the count of available slots for ACPI tables was not set correctly. Alexey Starikovskiy, Bob Moore.

Example Code and Data Size: These are the sizes for the OS-independent acpica.lib produced by the Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 32-bit compiler. The debug version of the code includes the debug output trace mechanism and has a much larger code and data size.

  Previous Release:
    Non-Debug Version:  87.5K Code, 18.4K Data, 105.9K Total
    Debug Version:     163.4K Code, 51.1K Data, 214.5K Total
  Current Release:
    Non-Debug Version:  87.9K Code, 18.6K Data, 106.5K Total
    Debug Version:     163.5K Code, 51.3K Data, 214.8K Total

2) iASL Compiler/Disassembler and Tools:

iASL: Implement limited typechecking for values returned from predefined control methods. The type of any returned static (unnamed) object is now validated. For example, Return(1). ACPICA BZ 786.

iASL: Fixed a predefined name object verification regression. Fixes a problem introduced in version 20100304. An error is incorrectly generated if a predefined name is declared as a static named object with a value defined using the keywords "Zero", "One", or "Ones". Lin Ming.

iASL: Added Windows 7 support for the -g option (get local ACPI tables) by reducing the requested registry access rights. ACPICA BZ 842.

Disassembler: fixed a possible fault when generating External() statements. Introduced in commit ae7d6fd: Properly handle externals with parent-prefix (carat). Fixes a string length allocation calculation. Lin Ming.