Re: [PATCH 3/3] ACPI: ARM64: support for ACPI_TABLE_UPGRADE

From: Jon Masters
Date: Tue May 17 2016 - 12:49:07 EST


On 05/17/2016 12:44 PM, Jon Masters wrote:

> 1). During development of a platform, it is much easier to debug
> problems with tables if you can test replacement ones without having to
> respin the firmware. In the server world, you usually don't have the
> firmware source code, so to get it respun could be days-weeks even if
> you are working with the authors closely. We have practically used this
> feature on a number of platforms already and it will continue.

For example, on one platform we were unable to fully boot RHEL(SA) due
to a bug in one of the ACPI tables. But I was able to boot the system to
a ramdisk containing a uuencode library and then write out the content
of the tables over the serial port, then decompile/patch/recompile, and
override replacement tables on the system. Then we beat the vendor up
with the fixes and the official firmware was corrected.


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