Re: Calibration issues with USB disc present.

[Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 16:03 -0800, Max Krasnyansky wrote:
> I think in the short term your best bet is to globally disable SMI at
> early
> boot stage (ie before TSC calibration).
> Some people might argue that it's not the most graceful solution
> because it might
> brake some BIOS features but it's a very common trick that is used by
> RT folks
> (for example RTAI has configurable option to enable SMI workaround)
> because
> on some chipset/BIOS combinations SMIs introduce horrible latencies.
> And you
> cannot do much about that other than disabling SMI.
> I have not seen any reports of negative side effects of disabling SMI
> yet. But
> if you're worried about that you could re-enable it later when you're
> done with
> TSC calibration and stuff.
> 

Hmm, interesting, I had no idea this was possible.  Is there a generic
way to disable SMI?  It would be useful for the -rt tree as lots of low
latency audio users have problems with SMI induced underruns.

Lee