I poked around a little with respect to use of System Management Mode in FreeMWare. I was looking into it's use to play games with the selector RPL and descriptor DPL values. But I doesn't seem well suited for this, not so much because of the capabilites, but access to getting into SMM. First, we'd be up against multiple chipsets to deal with. This didn't worry me too much. But a big problem is that the SMRAM memory space is locked down after being initialized by the BIOS (at least on the chipset I looked up). The lock was one way and can only be unlocked upon a power-on reset. This effect being we couldn't write our own SMM handler to the SMM memory space. Unless I'm missing something, this doesn't appear to be such a viable option. Perhaps there's some kind of system reset and CMOS reg 0x0f trickery to do to override the BIOS lockdown, but I think we'd better not play with that. Guess it's back to old-fashion virtualization strategies... -Kevin
