ACPICA version 20080829 released

[Moore, Robert]

29 August 2008. Summary of changes for version 20080829:

1) ACPI CA Core Subsystem:

Completed a major cleanup of the internal ACPI_OPERAND_OBJECT of type Reference. Changes include the elimination of cheating on the Object field for the DdbHandle subtype, addition of a reference class field to differentiate the various reference types (instead of an AML opcode), and the cleanup of debug output for this object. Lin Ming, Bob Moore. BZ 723

Reduce an error to a warning for an incorrect method argument count. Previously aborted with an error if too few arguments were passed to a control method via the external ACPICA interface. Now issue a warning instead and continue. Handles the case where the method inadvertently declares too many arguments, but does not actually use the extra ones. Applies mainly to the predefined methods. Lin Ming. Linux BZ 11032.

Disallow the evaluation of named object types with no intrinsic value. Return AE_TYPE for objects that have no value and therefore evaluation is undefined: Device, Event, Mutex, Region, Thermal, and Scope. Previously, evaluation of these types were allowed, but an exception would be generated at some point during the evaluation. Now, the error is generated up front.

Fixed a possible memory leak in the AcpiNsGetExternalPathname function (nsnames.c). Fixes a leak in the error exit path.

Removed the obsolete debug levels ACPI_DB_WARN and ACPI_DB_ERROR. These debug levels were made obsolete by the ACPI_WARNING, ACPI_ERROR, and ACPI_EXCEPTION interfaces. Also added ACPI_DB_EVENTS to correspond with the existing ACPI_LV_EVENTS.

Removed obsolete and/or unused exception codes from the acexcep.h header. There is the possibility that certain device drivers may be affected if they use any of these exceptions.

The ACPICA documentation has been added to the public git source tree, under acpica/documents. Included are the ACPICA programmer reference, the iASL compiler reference, and the changes.txt release logfile.

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:  79.7K Code, 16.4K Data,  96.1K Total
    Debug Version:     153.9K Code, 48.4K Data, 202.3K Total
  Current Release:
    Non-Debug Version:  79.7K Code, 16.4K Data,  96.1K Total
    Debug Version:     153.7K Code, 48.2K Data, 201.9K Total

2) iASL Compiler/Disassembler and Tools:

Allow multiple argument counts for the predefined _SCP method. ACPI 3.0 defines _SCP with 3 arguments. Previous versions defined it with only 1 argument. iASL now allows both definitions.

iASL/disassembler: avoid infinite loop on bad ACPI tables. Check for zero-length subtables when disassembling ACPI tables. Also fixed a couple of errors where a full 16-bit table type field was not extracted from the input properly.

acpisrc: Improve comment counting mechanism for generating source code statistics. Count first and last lines of multi-line comments as whitespace, not comment lines. Handle Linux legal header in addition to standard acpica header.