ACPI 5.0

[Colin Ian King]

Hi fwts developers,

We are en-route to making fwts handle ACPI 5.0, but there is still a 
*lot* more work to be done.

Here are some tasks that need completing:

1) Check out the ACPI 5.0 spec [1] revision history (pages iii, iv) to 
see what's new.

2) Identify new ACPI tables and add support for them (e.g. add to fwts 
acpidump and where necessary add tests to verify these tables).  [ We 
may want to also identify tables missing from fwts for ACPI 4.0 too ]

3) Identify new ACPI 5.0 controls and add tests for these to the 
"method" test.  I've already enumerated all of these new controls (and 
found a few that I omitted from ACPI 4.0) but we need still need to 
write a whole load of tests for these.

4) Identify changes to existing tables (added fields + features) and 
expand existing tests where necessary.

As a sanity check, we should also look at the recent kernel changes to 
the ACPI driver see what's new, learn from this and see if there are any 
new sanity checks we should be putting into fwts. This breaks down to:

a) Do we need to completely write new tests?
b) Do we need to extend the current tests? e.g. battery tests, klog, 
fadt, etc.

..so lots more to do.

I propose we get somebody to work through the list of changes and write 
these up.  We should then prioritize the changes to fwts to cater for 
these changes. Then we can get volunteers to opt-in to implement the 
missing features.  If one is starting to work on a feature it makes 
sense to inform others in this mailing list.

Anyhow, I'm open for discussion on how to move this forward and for any 
suggestions to help make this plan work.

Discuss! :-)

Colin

References:

[1] http://www.acpi.info/DOWNLOADS/ACPIspec50.pdf