[coreboot] SMM handling and resident coreboot

[Joseph Smith]

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:09:48 -0700, "ron minnich" <rminnich at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Keeping coreboot running once the OS boots?
> 
> This is definitely  a total change in our philosophy but I am ready
> for it, I guess, after fighting it for 9 years. There seems to be no
> escape from runtime support for OSes. .
> 
> I'm not really thinking in terms of anything we have now, such as
> "today's Xen kernel" or whatever. But virtualization as a unifying
> theme for all the PC kludgery -- BIOS, SMI, EFI, etc. --  is
> attractive. IBM has used virtualization for 40 years now, to good
> effect, to insulate OSes from hardware strangeness. Sony will use it
> to insulate the PS/3 linux from hardware changes -- they are providing
> a 10-year guarantee that linux will not need changes to run on PS/3.
> 
> Right now on PC there are many types of virtualization --- and I
> really think this is true virtualization:  when CPU does an I/O to a
> keyboard chip  that does not exist, and gets a result back, what else
> do you call it? That is what the USB stacks in commercial BIOSes do.
> 
> There is lots of virtual hardware in our PCs nowadays, and the OSes
> depend on it. My early hope was that we would free Linux from this
> model. But Linux now depends on the "Steenkin' BIOS" more than it ever
> did -- you can't boot a K8 in Linux without ACPI there. Linux
> dependency on the BIOS is increasing over time.
> 
> Anyway, just a random idea, I am going to pursue it and, if there are
> others interested, let me know. I've done a bit of work with
> virtualization over the last few years and I can't get this idea out
> of my head.
> 
Isn't this is what the AVATT GSoC 2008 project is all about?
http://www.coreboot.org/AVATT

-- 
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org