[coreboot] SMM handling and resident coreboot

[Kevin O'Connor]

Hi Ron,

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 08:14:55AM -0700, ron minnich wrote:
> If you think about it, SMI, VSA, ACPI, EFI, and even the old BIOS --
> all are there to virtualize resources that in some cases don't even
> exist, but in other cases are non-standard.I am wondering about
> stepping back from the problem and going at it with this approach --
> that a runtime BIOS is really there to virtualize resourcs. Viewed
> this way, the answer is somewhat easier. The runtime BIOS can be a
> hypervisor. The models supported by these many varying systems are
> viewed as subset functions of a  hypervisor.

You seem to be suggesting that we could create a bios that just always
ran its payload in an emulated machine.

I believe vmware has a product that does something similar - it
doesn't run at the bios level, but it can use PXE boot (of similar) to
launch a hypervisor that takes over the machine and then makes it
available for guests to be scheduled on.

The problem I see with this is that a hypervisor can have significant
overhead.  (One has to task switch to the hypervisor to do IO.)  Also,
I doubt everyone will agree on a single hypervisor implementation
(kvm, vmware, virtualbox, xen, microsoft's vm, etc.).

-Kevin