SMM is killing hard "real time capability" and also killing hard security, unless it's code is public. Those TCP/IP stacks within SMM-BIOS do not make everyone happy. --Q
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger schrieb: > 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 > -- linuxbios mailing list linuxbios@linuxbios.org http://www.linuxbios.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios