bits-1219 released with these changes:

BITS now builds via a Makefile rather than a shell script. This allows the build to run in parallel, significantly speeding up builds.

Note that unlike the build script, which autodetected the number of CPUs to build on, the Makefile uses the usual -j option to make. So, if you're used to ./build autodetecting your CPUs, you'll want to use make -j$(nproc) (or just directly specify your desired amount of parallelism, as you do with other makefiles).

Use make V=1 to let make echo commands before it runs them.

Use make LOCAL=1 to include local-files in the build (formerly ./build local).

BITS now builds within a build subdirectory of the source rather than a temporary directory under /tmp. The build system no longer removes this directory as part of the build, only via an explicit make clean, to make it easier to investigate the build results.

Note that despite building via Make, BITS does not attempt to support incremental builds. We continue to recommend ccache to speed up rebuilds.

Notable new features:

• Add a menu entry to exit back to EFI.

• Show on the main menu how BITS was booted: 32-bit BIOS, 32-bit EFI, or 64-bit EFI.

• Support reading and writing control registers.

  bits.read_cr(apicid, n) reads CRn.

  bits.write_cr(apicid, n, value) writes value to CRn.

  Both functions return None on GPF.

Various improvements to the pager:

• When showing output from Python code via the pager, capture tracebacks and display those via the pager as well, so that they wait for input. Previously, if an exception occurred, it would flash on the screen briefly before returning directly to the menu, requiring a trip to the log to view the traceback.

  Also display the output produced before the exception.

• Don't suggest going up when at the top of the output.

• Mention Up as well as PgUp.

• Clean up and simplify logic for EFI file handling and for displaying available options.

Migrate quite a bit of code from C to Python:

• efi: Remove efi.call and the underlying _efi methods supporting it

  Now that we can call EFI functions via ctypes, we don't need efi.call anymore.

• Remove bits.malloc and bits.memmove, now unused with the move to ctypes

• acpi: Use ctypes to call most ACPICA functions from Python, rather than wrapping them via the Python C API.

  This allows replacing several C functions with simpler Python equivalents.

  Because the 32-bit BIOS port uses a calling convention unsupported by libffi, introduce various trivial C wrappers that re-export ACPICA functions with the standard C calling convention. For AcpiWalkNamespace, introduce a more detailed wrapper that handles callbacks back into Python-provided functions.

  Export acpica_init to Python as well, and call it before calling the ACPICA functions.

• acpi: Move unsafe_io handling from C to Python.

  Directly export the address of the variable and manipulate it using ctypes.

• acpi: Add acpi.install_interface, wrapping AcpiInstallInterface, for use in the ACPI OS features menu.

• acpi: Add an exception mechanism with error code names, and a function to transform an ACPI_STATUS value into an exception. This uses AcpiFormatException to decode error codes.

• acpi: Add docstrings to ACPICA functions

Migrate quite a bit of code from GRUB scripting (and supporting C and Python scaffolding) to Python:

• Convert MWAIT latency test to Python, with a minimal C helper for the timing-sensitive portion.

  Delete the now-unused timer and cpu_ping commands.

• Port mwait menu to Python

• Drop code to force specific configuration profiles on Nehalem and Sandy Bridge.

  This code remains available in older releases, but drop it from the current version rather than porting it from GRUB configuration language to Python.

• configure.cfg: Drop support for CPU-specific GRUB configure menu files, since no more such files remain.

• Factor out a bits.brandstring() function to return the brandstring.

• Generate the CPU name on the main menu using Python, and improve title to use CPU brandstring rather than maintaining a table of CPU marketing names in BITS.

• Delete CPU family names and marketing names.

• Drop GRUB-based CPU detection entirely.

  None of the GRUB config files depend on the variables this sets anymore; all CPU-specific code lives in Python now.

• Remove the testsuite module and C expression evaluator.

  The GRUB CPU detection code was the last user of this.

• Remove options to GRUB commands to run on particular CPUs.

  The GRUB CPU detection code was the last programmatic user of this, and command-line users can use Python for this.

• Remove all GRUB commands and options not used manually.

  Nothing uses these commands programmatically anymore, so drop mechanisms to write to environment variables, operate quietly, run tests, format environment variables for display, sleep, or set mwait.

  A future version of BITS may remove the remaining commands entirely, in favor of Python functions, as the Python functions become increasingly high-level and convenient. If you still rely on the GRUB commands, please contact us.

Migrating all this code from C and GRUB to Python allowed deleting over 9000 lines of code in BITS relative to the previous release.

Other changes in this release:

• Remove the runppm command to load and run power-management reference code; this is no longer used with current CPUs.

• README.Developers.txt: Update for the switch to build with make.

• README.Developers.txt: Update reference to GRUB version information.

• README.Developers.txt: BITS doesn't need the todos command anymore.

• acpi: Fix reinitialization after termination. Clear all of the initialization flags, so that reinitialization actually loads tables rather than failing. This fixes the menu items to change what OS features BITS advertises to ACPI.

• acpi: Don't retrieve full table data just to check if a table exists. get_table and get_table_addr both return None for a nonexistent table, but the former returns a string containing the full table data, while the latter just returns the address.

• acpi: Drop support for AcpiGbl_EnableAmlDebugObject. Our current setting for AcpiDbgLevel leaves the debug object always enabled regardless of this value, so drop it.

• acpi: Add assert that the number of ACPI_OBJECT_TYPE values hasn't changed

• acpi: Use bool to return errors from ACPICA initialization

  Stop using GRUB error codes, since the error code never gets passed through GRUB.

  Also use the proper type to hold ACPICA error codes.

• efi: Add network-related protocol GUIDs

• efi: Add EFI_PCI_IO_PROTOCOL and a simple test function

• Convert many modules to use from __future__ import print_function.

• testmsr: Remove redundant output in MSR result descriptions

• Eliminate redundant acpica2.h header; move contents to acpica.h

• Delete unused header file misc.h