28 March 2013. Summary of changes for version 20130328: This release is available at https://www.acpica.org/downloads Note: The site is undergoing reconstruction and may not be available for a few days. 1) ACPICA kernel-resident subsystem: Fixed several possible race conditions with the internal object reference counting mechanism. Some of the external ACPICA interfaces update object reference counts without holding the interpreter or namespace lock. This change adds a spinlock to protect reference count updates on the internal ACPICA objects. Reported by and with assistance from Andriy Gapon (avg(a)FreeBSD.org). FADT support: Removed an extraneous warning for very large GPE register sets. This change removes a size mismatch warning if the legacy length field for a GPE register set is larger than the 64-bit GAS structure can accommodate. GPE register sets can be larger than the 255-bit width limitation of the GAS structure. Linn Crosetto (linn(a)hp.com). _OSI Support: handle any errors from AcpiOsAcquireMutex. Check for error return from this interface. Handles a possible timeout case if ACPI_WAIT_FOREVER is modified by the host to be a value less than "forever". Jung-uk Kim. Predefined name support: Add allowed/required argument type information to the master predefined info table. This change adds the infrastructure to enable typechecking on incoming arguments for all predefined methods/objects. It does not actually contain the code that will fully utilize this information, this is still under development. Also condenses some duplicate code for the predefined names into a new module, utilities/utpredef.c 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. Previous Release: Non-Debug Version: 95.0K Code, 25.9K Data, 120.9K Total Debug Version: 182.9K Code, 75.6K Data, 258.5K Total Current Release: Non-Debug Version: 95.2K Code, 26.4K Data, 121.6K Total Debug Version: 183.0K Code, 76.0K Data, 259.0K Total 2) iASL Compiler/Disassembler and Tools: iASL: Implemented a new option to simplify the development of ACPI-related BIOS code. Adds support for a new "offset table" output file. The -so option will create a C table containing the AML table offsets of various named objects in the namespace so that BIOS code can modify them easily at boot time. This can simplify BIOS runtime code by eliminating expensive searches for "magic values", enhancing boot times and adding greater reliability. With assistance from Lee Hamel. iASL: Allow additional predefined names to return zero-length packages. Now, all predefined names that are defined by the ACPI specification to return a "variable-length package of packages" are allowed to return a zero length top-level package. This allows the BIOS to tell the host that the requested feature is not supported, and supports existing BIOS/ASL code and practices. iASL: Changed the "result not used" warning to an error. This is the case where an ASL operator is effectively a NOOP because the result of the operation is not stored anywhere. For example: Add (4, Local0) There is no target (missing 3rd argument), nor is the function return value used. This is potentially a very serious problem -- since the code was probably intended to do something, but for whatever reason, the value was not stored. Therefore, this issue has been upgraded from a warning to an error. AcpiHelp: Added allowable/required argument types to the predefined names info display. This feature utilizes the recent update to the predefined names table (above).