[coreboot] SMM handling and resident coreboot

[ron minnich]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Kevin O'Connor <kevin at koconnor.net> wrote:

> You seem to be suggesting that we could create a bios that just always
> ran its payload in an emulated machine.

it's a question. The PS/3 and XBOX 360 are proofs of concept.

Anyway for me it's a research avenue we may pursue.

> The problem I see with this is that a hypervisor can have significant
> overhead.  (One has to task switch to the hypervisor to do IO.)  Also,
> I doubt everyone will agree on a single hypervisor implementation
> (kvm, vmware, virtualbox, xen, microsoft's vm, etc.).
>


There is newer hardware such as Opteron SVM and chipsets with MMUIO
allow direct hardware access from a guest.

 It is not the case that one must ask the hypervisor to do I/O. More
and more frequently, esp. in multicore systems, hypervisors are also
used to partition the system, not just time share the CPU. Things are
changing rapidly in the hypervisor universe.

thanks

ron