[coreboot] SMM handling and resident coreboot

[Eric W. Biederman]

"ron minnich" <rminnich at gmail.com> writes:

> There is lots of virtual hardware in our PCs nowadays, and the OSes
> depend on it. My early hope was that we would free Linux from this
> model. But Linux now depends on the "Steenkin' BIOS" more than it ever
> did -- you can't boot a K8 in Linux without ACPI there. Linux
> dependency on the BIOS is increasing over time.

Let's just remember that the practical boundary we draw is support for
mainboard specific things.  We need to do one of a couple of things.
- Pass a device tree (or other data structure) to the kernel with all
  of the little motherboard specific wiring details to get software
  that understands the hardware to work.
- Make using and understanding the hardware irrelevant.
- Some level of virtualization.

In general the firmware is the hardest and most dangerous part of the system
to update.  Plus there is never enough time to develop it.  So we need
to keep things as simple as we can (for developers at least).

Eric