On Fri, 29 Aug 2014, Len Ovens wrote:
I see what you mean, every time I thought I was getting somewhere, I got sent to yet another page. The most I got out of it was that EFI is intel's answer to grub but with more control of the firware settings at the same time. The old bios included calls to access some of the HW, but no one used them as they were not muti-task/user friendly. It appears EFI does the same thing and windows uses it and Linux does not know how to access at least part of it. (or windows sets up its own calls within it)
What I forgot to add, is that it is obvious that a larger part of this code sticks around and is still running after boot. At least with the bios that didn't seem to be true. Some of this code may be called by SMIs and of course the OS has less control of what is there. This code is not open source and aside from security considerations (inteligent ethernet IFs have that problem) RT performance may suffer.
I would suggest the xeon set of processors and MB may be more controlable just because the server market demands it be so. Turning SMIs off on these boards voids the warranty due to heat considerations, but my monitoring of temperature while in performance mode with all cores at 100% use on my 4 core i5 has shown no problems. The temperature has remained well below the point speed reduction would be indicated. In fact ondemand can make things hotter, I found manually running one core at a lower speed actually increased the temperature. There are a lot of different xeon models and it is possible to get them with no HT or boost. I was thinking of getting such a MB, but could find none with PCI slots. I do not know if they would make better audio boards though. At the other end of the server market is the atom MB which are good headless audio machines (the graphics part is not linux friendly) using less power, cooling and being small besides. Many of these MB have one PCI slot and there are "L" adaptors that allow the card to use less space so an older (well supported) audio card could be used.
-- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
