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.
But the low level VM layer, done right, can work well: see IBM, who sell billions of dollars worth of power and 390 and Cell systems every year that do this.
Anyway, it's not going to happen any time soon, if at all. I'm just looking at it. But our inability to kill ACPI tells me something. Even OLPC has to do ACPI now. The last valiant charge of OFW is going to come to naught in the PC world, I am afraid. Sometimes, the (sub)standards are impossible to kill.
ron