On 11/23/2010 02:24 AM, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 05:45:49PM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
On 11/22/2010 04:49 PM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
Dunno. As I understand it the biggest issue is that kvm needs complete instruction emulation for big real mode as intel vmx supports protected mode only. Correct Avi?
Correct. Note, it's likely that we have almost everything covered already, so it's mostly testing (beyond implementing SMM entry/exit).
The big real mode support needed for SMM is no greater than the big real mode supported needed for option roms. Since option roms work today, I'm not sure what more is needed. (I recall there being a problem with %eip>64K, but there's no reason to do that in SMM so I don't think it is an issue.)
Okay, then it's simply a matter of implementing SMM entry and RSM, adding save/restore support, and interfaces for asserting #SMI.
However, we have a large deployed base with no SMM support, so we need a fallback if SMM is not available. It's also tricky to probe for working SMM, I don't think there's a cpuid bit for that.
There's already a check for this today - if a specific PCI device exists then seabios tries to setup SMM, otherwise it doesn't.
Which PCI device is that?
When you say "tries", do you mean it allows for failure?