Re: [PATCH] ShellPkg: Add acpiview tool to dump ACPI tables

[Bhupesh SHARMA <bhupesh.linux@gmail.com>]

Hi All,

On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 7:01 AM, Yao, Jiewen <jiewen.yao@intel.com> wrote:
> HI Even
> Thank you for the response.
>
> *Mike Kinney* is managing staging tree – he may help answer the question on staging. ☺
>
> I am glad to co-work with you on that.
>
> Merry Christmas!
>
>
> Thank you
> Yao Jiewen
>
> From: Evan Lloyd [mailto:Evan.Lloyd@arm.com]
> Sent: Friday, December 23, 2016 2:26 AM
> To: Yao, Jiewen <jiewen.yao@intel.com>; Ni, Ruiyu <ruiyu.ni@intel.com>; Carsey, Jaben <jaben.carsey@intel.com>; Sami Mujawar <Sami.Mujawar@arm.com>
> Cc: Carsey, Jaben <jaben.carsey@intel.com>; edk2-devel@ml01.01.org; Leif Lindholm <leif.lindholm@linaro.org>; ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org
> Subject: RE: [edk2] [PATCH] ShellPkg: Add acpiview tool to dump ACPI tables
>
>
> Hi Jiewen.
> I hope I have our forename there, not your surname - it can be difficult to tell :-)
> I've trimmed a lot out  of the history below, for clarity.
>
>>
>>From: Yao, Jiewen [mailto:jiewen.yao@intel.com]
>>Sent: 20 December 2016 16:35
>>To: Evan Lloyd; Ni, Ruiyu; Carsey, Jaben; Sami Mujawar
>>Cc: Carsey, Jaben; edk2-devel@ml01.01.org<mailto:edk2-devel@ml01.01.org>; Leif Lindholm; ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org<mailto:ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org>
>>Subject: RE: [edk2] [PATCH] ShellPkg: Add acpiview tool to dump ACPI tables
>>
>>Thank you, Lloyd.
>>
>>Comment inline.
>>
> ...
>>[Jiewen] Got it.
>>As you mention, I hope it can be in SHELL spec, too.
>>
>>So that we can have a standard way to dump all table information.
>>
>>For X86 system, I have written similar tool to dump X86 related info.
>>I just check in to https://github.com/jyao1/EdkiiShellTool/tree/master/AcpiToolPkg.
>>It is also BSD license code. I tried by best to dump info for *all* the ACPI table.
>>But I do not validate ARM system. We complement to each other. ?
>
> Yes, we obviously need to get together over this.
>
>>...
>>[Jiewen] Let me summarize current status:
>>1)       We know there is strong requirement to dump ACPI table in UEFI shell environment, for debug purposes.
>>2)       UEFI shell specification does not contain any ACPI dump command. (Although it has SmbiosDump)
>>3)       ACPICA.ORG has sample code to dump ACPI.
>>> > >Binary can be downloaded from: https://acpica.org/downloads/uefi-support
>>> > >Source can be downloaded from: https://github.com/acpica/acpica
>>4)       This patch provides dump ACPI information with consistency check. But limitation is: it only supports the limited table on ARM platform. NO support for X86 platform.
>>5)       I have similar code to dump ACPI. But the limitation is: it only validated on X86 platform. It is not validated on ARM platform.
>>
>>
>>So I would like to propose:
>>1)       DOCUMENTATION: Can we co-work to submit an ECR for SHELL, to add AcpiDump command? So that people may get standard dump log in the future.
>
> This sounds fine, but I'd suggest getting it into the Shell spec is much lower
> priority than making the tool available.  We believe the checking aspect will
> help people detect errors at an early stage, so want to "get it out there".
>
>>2)       CODE: It seems both of our code is POC quality and has partial validation only. It might not be suitable to check in EDKII immediately
>>I would like to propose we co-work in EDKII staging tree - https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-staging/ (We have 4 features there.)
>
> That sounds excellent.  It will be a great thing to have ARM/Intel (or Intel/ARM if you prefer) cooperation on this.
>
>>We can align our design, then I can help validate X86 and you can help validate ARM.
>>Then we can submit a complete patch to EDKII ShellPkg.
>>
>>What about your idea?
>
> I think this potentially helps everyone in UEFI.
> Sadly, we are about to shut down for Christmas, and will not be back until 2017-01-03.  (I'm not really sad about it.)
> From looking at your code, I think we will be able to learn a lot about EDK2 programming from you.
> I suggest we can discuss the design and code merge aspects off list. (And make details of the results public in condensed form.)
>
> Do I need to ask anyone to give me commit rights to https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-staging?
> Or is it pull request based?
>
> Regards, and Merry Christmas,
> Evan
>
>>
>  Thank you
>>> Yao Jiewen
>>

I needed a ACPI table dump tool for fixing a issue with BGRT table
being passed to a x86_64 and AARCH64 Linux kernel. I just happened to
evaluate and use both the excellent tools:

[1]. https://github.com/jyao1/EdkiiShellTool from Yao Jiewen
[2]. https://github.com/EvanLloyd/tianocore/tree/651_acpiview_v1 from Evan

Since my use case was primarily to dump the BGRT ACPI table being
passed to the kernel although I tried both the tool flavours, I found
[1] more powerful in dumping the ACPI tables.

Since I needed this tool to work on Qemu on AARCH64 as well. so I
compiled [1] using AARCH64, GCC4.9 toolchain and after some changes -
which I have submitted to the edk2 list for review (see [3]), I was
able to use this flavour of the tool on a Qemu for AARCH64 as well to
dump the relevant ACPI tools.

[3]. https://lists.01.org/pipermail/edk2-devel/2017-January/006536.html

I think it would be quite useful to combine the two tools and harness
their power which will be specially useful to folks like me who at
times need to debug issues at the firmware - kernel boundary.

Please let me know if I can contribute/help test any code
development/patches on this front.

Thanks,
Bhupesh