[coreboot] SMM handling and resident coreboot

[yhlu]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 9:27 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Peter Stuge <peter at 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.

Now those patches is in v2.6.26. thanks Ingo
also there is one update_mptable option, that could be used to convert
acpi routing to mptable...
-- in 2.6.27-rc1.

please keep in mind, SMI is evil.

YH