Re: libata/sata_nv latency on NVIDIA CK804 [was Re: AMD64 X2 lost ticks on PM timer]

Ingo Molnar
2006-03-15T22:49:18Z

* Bill Rugolsky Jr. <brugolsky@telemetry-investments.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 11:24:41PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > well, it's a PIO inb() op i think, and could thus in theory trigger SMM
> > BIOS code.
>
> Is there any easy way to disable more SMM stuff than "noacpi"?

not that i know of. Point of SMM is to make it hard to disable by OSs.
They are a kind of hypervisor mode for the purposes of seemless hardware
soft-extensions, from the days when it wasnt yet fashionable to call
them virtualization ;)

> If push comes to shove, I'll go all the way and just install LinuxBIOS
> on the damn thing. Though I'm sure that will be a chore.

i think it might be easier to try the new sata_nv.c driver first.

Ingo