My kid hates Linux (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

My kid hates Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Apr 15, 2008 10:20 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: My kid hates Linux (ZDNet) by drag
Parent article: My kid hates Linux (ZDNet)

Thanks to ACPI, they can slow down the system all the time, and can interrupt your OS whenever
they like and do whatever they like to the hardware, increasing instability in ways that are
entirely impossible for the kernel hackers to fix.

PC hardware. Gotta love it.

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My kid hates Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Apr 15, 2008 15:08 UTC (Tue) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]

ACPI is actually less of a problem in this respect because it's executed by the OS.  There's a
ACPI virtual machine language.

I think you are talking about SMM which is set up by the BIOS and does indeed run whatever and
whenever it feels like.  LinuxBIOS/CoreBoot is the way to avoid that.  SMM is definitely
something to avoid if you need hard, fast real-time.

My kid hates Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Apr 15, 2008 16:43 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Thanks for the pointer about SMM - at least one Microsoftie agrees with you that "SMM is
evil": http://blogs.msdn.com/carmencr/archive/2005/09/01/459194.... 

Summary of SMM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode - seems this is now
mandated by Microsoft through DMI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Management_Interface -
and DMI is supported by some Linux distros apparently.

Any ideas on how to avoid SMM?  Can it be disabled in some BIOSes for example?