bios-tables-test and iasl

bios-tables-test and iasl

[Ani Sinha]

So I was working late scratching my head yesterday on why I was not getting my ASL diff on mismatched blobs! Turns out there were two things:

(a) iasl was not installed and I completely forgot about it because my old setup is gone and the new box is, well new and I did not get to mess around with tables up until now. This was easy to figure out.
(b) I recalled that previously all I had to do was install iasl and the binary would just produce the diff because it would discover iasl was in the PATH. Now it seemed no matter what I did I was not able to get the diff until I rebased and it triggered a clean build of qemu tree. Turns out, now we check iasl existence from meson and CONFIG_IASL is set from the build time (if not set, *iasl is NULL and no diff is generated).

So I wonder if we have made our lives any easier? Why should we need to rebuild the entire tree if all we wanted was to debug a test breakage? Sure we could always run iasl manually but isn’t it easier to simply run "V=1 make check-qtest” and let the test spit it out for us?

A