ACPI is the Advanced Configuration and Power management Interface. ASL is the language used to compile the tables describing the computer's hardware. In some cases it may be helpful to edit some of those tables, most notably the DSDT.
There are several methods to dump the ACPI tables. Given the dump of an ACPI table, one typically wants to decompile the ".aml" file, modify the resulting ASL code (often with the ending ".dsl") and finally recompile it. These two feats are accomplished by Intel's ASL compiler "iasl". You may just want to download the binary at the end of the post and put it in /usr/local/bin or you can compile it yourself as outlined below.
Update: As reported by Slice, the latest version ("acpica-unix-20110623") compiles with a simple "make", at least on Lion 10.7.1 with Xcode 4.1.
1. You need xCode installed (from the App Store, free download for Lion)
2. Get the current source from http://www.acpica.org/downloads/unix_source_code.php
3. Open Terminal, change dir to where you want to have your source code.
4. Extract the source tarball by running
CODE
tar xf ~/Downloads/acpica-unix-20110623.tar
5. Change directory to "compiler"
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cd compiler
6. Run the following command:
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make
8. You get a file called "iasl" the current directory... this is your ASL compiler
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sudo cp iasl /usr/bin/
(there is no need to set the permissions, the linker does that for you)
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Intel ACPI Component Architecture
ASL Optimizing Compiler version 20110623-64 [Sep 7 2011]
Copyright (c) 2000 - 2011 Intel Corporation
Supports ACPI Specification Revision 4.0a
ASL Optimizing Compiler version 20110623-64 [Sep 7 2011]
Copyright (c) 2000 - 2011 Intel Corporation
Supports ACPI Specification Revision 4.0a
Download just the "iasl" binary file version 20110623-64:Click to view attachment
Latest vesion
