Re: [coreboot] [SeaBIOS] Compiling SeaBIOS for coreboot has problems with its ACPI code

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 07:34:37PM +0000, Moore, Robert wrote:
> This is very interesting. If I understand correctly, you are using a
> utility plus various directives to generate tables of AML offsets --
> presumably in order to dynamically change AML values, correct?

Yes - exactly.  We started off completely generating the SSDT
dynamically, but that got awkward when we needed to generate Processor
objects dynamically.  So, we compiled an SSDT as template and then
patched it.  It was fragile to hard-code the offsets, so a tool was
written to parse the IASL output and generate the offsets
automatically.

I'm CC'ing the coreboot list - they have also been doing SSDT runtime
generation.
> I have to say that I have not seen anything like this, from any BIOS vendor.
> > By the way, is there interest in adding some of the functionality that
> > we get by parsing the listing to iasl directly?
>
> We are always interested in adding features to make the compiler
> more useful. What would you suggest?

The tool currently generates offsets and can rename the Amlcode[]
variable to something more unique.  I'm sure additional features could
be thought up.

-Kevin

[SeaBIOS] Compiling SeaBIOS for coreboot has problems with its ACPI code

[Moore, Robert]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kevin O'Connor [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2012 7:23 PM
> To: Moore, Robert
> Cc: Michael S. Tsirkin; Idwer Vollering; [e-mail]; Tang, Feng;
> [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: [SeaBIOS] Compiling SeaBIOS for coreboot has problems with its
> ACPI code
>
> On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 07:34:37PM +0000, Moore, Robert wrote:
> > This is very interesting. If I understand correctly, you are using a
> > utility plus various directives to generate tables of AML offsets --
> > presumably in order to dynamically change AML values, correct?
>
> Yes - exactly.  We started off completely generating the SSDT
> dynamically, but that got awkward when we needed to generate Processor
> objects dynamically.  So, we compiled an SSDT as template and then
> patched it.  It was fragile to hard-code the offsets, so a tool was
> written to parse the IASL output and generate the offsets
> automatically.
>
> I'm CC'ing the coreboot list - they have also been doing SSDT runtime
> generation.
> > I have to say that I have not seen anything like this, from any BIOS
>
> vendor.
> > > By the way, is there interest in adding some of the functionality that
> > > we get by parsing the listing to iasl directly?
> >
> > We are always interested in adding features to make the compiler
> > more useful. What would you suggest?
>
> The tool currently generates offsets and can rename the Amlcode[]
> variable to something more unique.  I'm sure additional features could
> be thought up.
>
> -Kevin

Here are additional thoughts and questions that I sent out earlier today:
> From what we have seen, standard BIOS code often modifies the AML on the fly (before the OS gets the ACPI tables) to handle the various setup options and other things. Some vendors do this better than others (we've seen checksum errors because of this, as well as package length issues because, for example, a byte constant is replaced by a dword constant but there is no room for the 32-bit value.)

Obviously, the iASL compiler knows the offset of not only the start of every ASL statement, but also the start of every argument of every ASL statement.

What we would be willing to provide is a new type of output file that provides arrays of offsets for you to use when modifying the AML. Something like this should be useful for your project, as well as standard BIOS code that needs this information as well.

The -sc option for iASL already provides a limited version of this, but only at the statement level with offsets within a trailing comment field:

/*
     *      10....{
     *      11....    Method (MAIN, 0, NotSerialized)
     */
    unsigned char    DSDT_Template_MAIN [] =
    {
        0x14,0x08,0x4D,0x41,0x49,0x4E,0x00,         /* 00000023    "..MAIN." */

/*
     *      12....    {
     *      13....        Return (Zero)
     */
        0xA4,0x00,                                  /* 00000025    ".." */

A new type of output file could instead create arrays of offsets, one offset per ASL term (statement or argument). The format could be something like one array per ASL statement or one array per method. You could then pick and choose which of these arrays you want to use/include into your BIOS code.

Does this sound like it would solve your issues?

Thanks,
Bob