Hi Ron, On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 08:14:55AM -0700, ron minnich wrote: > If you think about it, SMI, VSA, ACPI, EFI, and even the old BIOS -- > all are there to virtualize resources that in some cases don't even > exist, but in other cases are non-standard.I am wondering about > stepping back from the problem and going at it with this approach -- > that a runtime BIOS is really there to virtualize resourcs. Viewed > this way, the answer is somewhat easier. The runtime BIOS can be a > hypervisor. The models supported by these many varying systems are > viewed as subset functions of a hypervisor.
You seem to be suggesting that we could create a bios that just always ran its payload in an emulated machine. I believe vmware has a product that does something similar - it doesn't run at the bios level, but it can use PXE boot (of similar) to launch a hypervisor that takes over the machine and then makes it available for guests to be scheduled on. The problem I see with this is that a hypervisor can have significant overhead. (One has to task switch to the hypervisor to do IO.) Also, I doubt everyone will agree on a single hypervisor implementation (kvm, vmware, virtualbox, xen, microsoft's vm, etc.). -Kevin -- coreboot mailing list [email protected] http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
