Re: [GIT PULL] x86 fixes

H. Peter Anvin
2013-10-12T20:36:51Z

On 10/12/2013 12:41 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 12:28 PM, Matthew Garrett
> <matthew.garrett@nebula.com> wrote:
>>
>> The most likely cause of the problem that we're seeing here is that we're leaving the hardware in a state that isn't compatible with assumptions made by Dell's SMM code. We've certainly seen that some previous Dell machines have made incorrect assumptions about VT-d, which probably means that we should be destroying that state before reboot. David Woodhouse had been looking into that - I don't know whether we ever actually merged anything to do so.
>
> I have access to one of the affected Dell systems, so I'm willing to
> try patches..
>

The Dell machines definitely use some kind of SMM to reboot.

-hpa