[LinuxBIOS] Fallback checking normal

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

On 27.03.2007 16:41, WarrenHead wrote:
> 
> So, as an ordinary person who just owns a pc, what would I get out of 
> using linuxbios instead of the proprietary one that came with my machine 
> already?

There's one instant benefit: Better realtime behaviour for Professional
Audio/Video applications. Let me explain: All recent proprietary BIOS
releases use SMM (maybe not all, but I haven't seen one without).
SMM routines are not under the control of the operating system and will
be executed at arbitrary points in time with unknown (although mostly
noticeable) duration and the operating system will FREEZE during that
time. If you depend on low latency for audio applications, even "hard
realtime" kernels will never be able to guarantee you any latency,
simply because they don't know when the BIOS decides to block the CPU
with SMM.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel
-- 
http://www.hailfinger.org/