[LinuxBIOS] GX eval board

Li-Ta Lo ollie at lanl.gov
Tue Mar 21 18:00:26 CET 2006


On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 09:59 -0600, Richard Smith wrote:
> 
> I also don't fully yet grok the inner workings of the VSA.  All you
> who are in this deeper perhaps can comment.  Is there any hardware
> reason that the VSA _has_ to be in 16-bit mode?  I know orginally it
> had to be 16-bit for the BIOS callbacks, but we don't require all that
> legacy stuff.
> 

One problem is the VSA code is executed under the SMM. The SMM i
is 16-bit mode by default. Theoretically, we can have a 16-bit to
32-bit switch upon the entry of SMM and port the VSA to 32-bit
mode. I am not so sure if it is worth to do this.
 
> Can we port the necessary parts over to protected mode?
> 
> --
> Richard A. Smith
-- 
Li-Ta Lo <ollie at lanl.gov>
Los Alamos National Lab





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