Version 20140214

14 February 2014. Summary of changes for version 20140214:

1) ACPICA kernel-resident subsystem:

Implemented a new mechanism to proactively prevent problems with ill-
behaved reentrant control methods that create named ACPI objects. This
behavior is illegal as per the ACPI specification, but is nonetheless
frequently seen in the field. Previously, this could lead to an
AE_ALREADY_EXISTS exception if the method was actually entered by more
than one thread. This new mechanism detects such methods at table load
time and marks them "serialized" to prevent reentrancy. A new global
option, AcpiGbl_AutoSerializeMethods, has been added to disable this
feature if desired. This mechanism and global option obsoletes and
supersedes the previous AcpiGbl_SerializeAllMethods option.

Added the "Windows 2013" string to the _OSI support. ACPICA will now
respond TRUE to _OSI queries with this string. It is the stated policy of
ACPICA to add new strings to the _OSI support as soon as possible after
they are defined. See the full ACPICA _OSI policy which has been added to
the utilities/utosi.c file.

Hardened/updated the _PRT return value auto-repair code:
1) Do not abort the repair on a single subpackage failure, continue to
check all subpackages.
2) Add check for the minimum subpackage length (4).
3) Properly handle extraneous NULL package elements.

Added support to avoid the possibility of infinite loops when traversing
object linked lists. Never allow an infinite loop, even in the face of
corrupted object lists.

ACPICA headers: Deployed the use of #pragma pack(push) and #pragma
pack(pop) directives to ensure that the ACPICA headers are independent of
compiler settings or other host headers.

Example Code and Data Size: These are the sizes for the OS-independent
acpica.lib produced by the Microsoft Visual C++ 9.0 32-bit compiler. The
debug version of the code includes the debug output trace mechanism and
has a much larger code and data size.

Current Release:
Non-Debug Version: 96.5K Code, 27.2K Data, 123.7K Total
Debug Version: 188.6K Code, 79.0K Data, 267.6K Total
Previous Release:
Non-Debug Version: 96.2K Code, 27.0K Data, 123.2K Total
Debug Version: 187.5K Code, 78.3K Data, 265.8K Total

2) iASL Compiler/Disassembler and Tools:

iASL/Table-compiler: Fixed a problem with support for the SPMI table. The
first reserved field was incorrectly forced to have a value of zero. This
change correctly forces the field to have a value of one. ACPICA BZ 1081.

Debugger: Added missing support for the "Extra" and "Data" subobjects
when displaying object data.

Debugger: Added support to display entire object linked lists when
displaying object data.

iASL: Removed the obsolete -g option to obtain ACPI tables from the
Windows registry. This feature has been superseded by the acpidump
utility.