Version 20200717

17 July 2020. Summary of changes for version 20200717:

1) ACPICA kernel-resident subsystem:

Do not increment OperationRegion reference counts for field units. Recent server firmware has revealed that this reference count can overflow on large servers that declare many field units (thousands) under the same OperationRegion. This occurs because each field unit declaration will add a reference count to the source OperationRegion. This release solves the reference count overflow for OperationRegion objects by preventing fieldUnits from incrementing their parent OperationRegion's reference count.

Replaced one-element arrays with flexible-arrays, which were introduced in C99.

Restored the readme file containing the directions for generation of ACPICA from source on MSVC 2017. Updated the file for MSVC 2017. File is located at: generate/msvc2017/readme.txt

2) iASL Compiler/Disassembler and ACPICA tools:

iASL: Fixed a regression found in version 20200214. Prevent iASL from emitting an extra byte of garbage data when control methods declared a single parameter type without using braces. This extra byte is known to cause a blue screen on the Windows AML interpreter.

iASL: Made a change to allow external declarations to specify the type of a named object even when some name segments are not defined.
This change allows the following ASL code to compile (When DEV0 is not defined or not defined yet):

External (\_SB.DEV0.OBJ1, IntObj)
External (\_SB.DEV0, DeviceObj)

iASL: Fixed a problem where method names in "Alias ()" statement could be misinterpreted. They are now interpreted correctly as method invocations.

iASL: capture a method parameter count (Within the Method info segment, as well as the argument node) when using parameter type lists.