Hacking a custom DSDT into a QEMU BIOS

Today I was trying to reproduce a bunch of weird ACPI errors when executing AML code from a DSDT extracted from a remote machine. For some reason the AML in the 2.6.32 kernel was causing a bunch of warnings, but not in 2.6.35 and I wanted to see when the fix landed. This was a dirty hack so that I could quickly do kernel bisects running the kernel inside QEMU.

Firstly, I got the DSDT from the remote machine and converted into it form that could be included into the seabios BIOS images. I used the following C source:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int data;
int i = 0;

printf("unsigned char AmlCode[] = {");
for (i=0; (data = getchar()) != EOF; i++)
        printf("%s%s0x%2.2x", i>0 ? "," : "",
                (i & 7) ? "" : "\n\t", data);
printf("\n};\n");

exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

And built it with:

gcc -Wall hexdump.c -o hexdump

Next I generated a C compilable hex dump of the DSDT.dat raw image:

./hexdump < DSDT.dat > acpi-dsdt.hex

Then I got the seabios sources:

git clone git://git.linuxtogo.org/home/kevin/seabios.git

and the copied the acpi-dsdt.hex to seabios/src

..and then cd into seabios and built using make. This creates bios.bin in the directory called out.

Then I copied the current QEMU bios, vgabios and seabios images to my working directory:

cp -R /usr/share/qemu /usr/share/vgabios /usr/share/seabios/ .

and then copied the compiled seabios image into the newly copied seabios directory:

cp seabios/out/bios.bin seabios

Finally, I ran QEMU using new BIOS image as follows:

qemu -L qemu ubuntu.img

Bit of a hack, but it helped when I did not have the hardware to hand.