Version 20140424

24 April 2014. Summary of changes for version 20140424:

This release is available at https://acpica.org/downloads

1) ACPICA kernel-resident subsystem:

Implemented support to skip/ignore NULL address entries in the RSDT/XSDT. Some of these tables are known to contain a trailing NULL entry. Lv Zheng.

Removed an extraneous error message for the case where there are a large number of system GPEs (> 124). This was the "32-bit FADT register is too long to convert to GAS struct" message, which is irrelevant for GPEs since the GPEx_BLK_LEN fields of the FADT are always used instead of the (limited capacity) GAS bit length. Also, several changes to ensure proper support for GPE numbers > 255, where some "GPE number" fields were 8-bits internally.

Implemented and deployed additional configuration support for the public ACPICA external interfaces. Entire classes of interfaces can now be easily modified or configured out, replaced by stubbed inline functions by default. Lv Zheng.

Moved all public ACPICA runtime configuration globals to the public ACPICA external interface file for convenience. Also, removed some obsolete/unused globals. See the file acpixf.h. Lv Zheng.

Documentation: Added a new section to the ACPICA reference describing the maximum number of GPEs that can be supported by the FADT-defined GPEs in block zero and one. About 1200 total. See section 4.4.1 of the ACPICA reference.

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: 96.8K Code, 27.2K Data, 124.0K Total
Debug Version: 189.5K Code, 79.7K Data, 269.2K Total
Previous Release:
Non-Debug Version: 97.0K Code, 27.2K Data, 124.2K Total
Debug Version: 189.7K Code, 79.5K Data, 269.2K Total

2) iASL Compiler/Disassembler and Tools:

iASL and disassembler: Add full support for the LPIT table (Low Power Idle Table). Includes support in the disassembler, data table compiler, and template generator.

AcpiDump utility:
1) Add option to force the use of the RSDT (over the XSDT).
2) Improve validation of the RSDP signature (use 8 chars instead of 4).

iASL: Add check for predefined packages that are too large. For predefined names that contain subpackages, check if each subpackage is too large. (Check for too small already exists.)

Debugger: Updated the GPE command (which simulates a GPE by executing the GPE code paths in ACPICA). The GPE device is now optional, and defaults to the GPE 0/1 FADT-defined blocks.

Unix application OSL: Update line-editing support. Add additional error checking and take care not to reset terminal attributes on exit if they were never set. This should help guarantee that the terminal is always left in the previous state on program exit.