On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 9:27 AM, ron minnich rminnich@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Peter Stuge peter@stuge.se wrote:
I was thinking about the plugging and services and so on. I have always enjoyed coreboot being SMM free, and I consider that a huge marketing advantage even with the SMM handler being optional.
Also, if it is easy to add SMM code to coreboot I'm afraid it will become a trend and to me, it is not the right fix for anything.
I'm not really talking SMM. I'm talking about a hypervisor to provide a superset of what SMM and ACPI and all the others provide. This is a research activity and I'll see where it goes. It may go nowhere.
But it will be utterly GPL, and it will either do a far better job, and give us an improved world, or we don't do it.
My beef with SMM besides virtualizing hardware is the segregation and to some degree duplication of logic between OS and $othercode. Just like we enjoy Linux as bootloader because drivers are only in one place, I want to enjoy the operating system doing everything SMM is used for. You know, operations. Yes, it is revolutionary, at least for PCs.
It is, sadly, becoming revolutionary for Linux :-( Linux on Opteron can't really work right without ACPI. And YingHai's last try at fixing that was rejected by Andi Kleen.
Now those patches is in v2.6.26. thanks Ingo also there is one update_mptable option, that could be used to convert acpi routing to mptable... -- in 2.6.27-rc1.
please keep in mind, SMI is evil.
YH