[coreboot] cached SMI handler

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Fri, Feb 06, 2009 at 11:50:26PM +0100, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> ron minnich wrote:
> > Stepan can tell us, since he has working smm on kontron, but I can not
> > believe smm can not be cached.
> Occasionally a CPU might do speculative readahead on the SMRAM memory
> while not in SMM. The chipset will generate master aborts on the PCI
> bus, so the cached data is incorrect (0xff) and upon SMM entry the CPU
> goes to nirvana. The SMM area in ASEG is always uncached. The upper
> SMRAM areas can be cached, but they must only be cached while in SMM.

If there is memory only accessible from SMM mode, then I agree it
would need to be uncached.  I thought that Jason was just reserving
memory for use by SMM - memory that could also be read/written in
non-SMM mode.  In that case, I did not think caching needed to be
disabled.  Indeed, the intel system programming guide recommends using
some cached memory for SMM.

-Kevin


Random thought - I wonder if the OS could "break into" SMM mode by
turning on caching for the SMM area and then manipulating the cache
contents so that an SMI used icache/dcache contents set by the OS.