Linus Torvalds wrote: > > This discussion is just taking us down a rat-hole of more complexity, and > _way_ more fragility. > > I'm absolutely willing to bet that trying to do the BIOS calls will break > way more than it will fix. Sure, it will probably work for 99.9% of all > BIOSes, but then it will break horribly for some BIOS that tries to do > something "clever". SMM has already been mentioned as an example of > something that simply isn't virtualizable. > > Timing is another, very traditional, one. There used to be video BIOSes > that simply didn't work in a dosbox-like environment because they had > tight timing loops that were coupled to hardware. I can pretty much > guarantee that that has gone away as far as the video BIOS is concerned, > but the main BIOS? Who the hell knows. > > Sure, none of the calls we do to the BIOS from the kernel should need > anything fancy at all, and maybe I'm pessimistic. But at the same time, I > really don't think the BIOS calls are worth that kind of infrastructure. > > Sure, go ahead and wrap them in some kind of "save and restore all > registers" wrapping, but nothing fancier than that. It would just be > overkill, and likely to break more than it fixes. > Agreed completely. -hpa -- H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center I work for Intel. I don't speak on their behalf. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-tip-commits" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
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