From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" To: Jonathan Larmour Cc: "ecos-discuss@sources.redhat.com" Subject: Re: [ECOS] Porting to 80386ex... Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 11:23:00 -0000 Message-id: <4.3.2.7.2.20010226141810.00abc240@mail.larwe.com> References: <200102250307.TAA14041@cygnus.com> <3A9AAADD.50A4FC09@redhat.com> X-SW-Source: 2001-02/msg00392.html > > Then if 386ex runs in System Mangement Mode, is it a architecture HAL > porting , or just a platform HAL porting ,since there are additional registers. > >By this do you mean ring 0 versus ring1/2 ? SMM is a special mode. Essentially it freezes the states of all virtual machines and flips some "extra" memory into the address space that is not normally accessible. Typical use would be when you hit the suspend-to-disk button on a portable PC. The CPU is whacked into SMM, and it jumps into code that saves hardware register contents and display RAM, then displays a "saving to disk" message and writes out all the contents of everything to the hard disk. === Lewin A.R.W. Edwards (Embedded Engineer) Work: http://www.digi-frame.com/ Personal: http://www.zws.com/ and http://www.larwe.com/ "Und setzet ihr nicht das Leben ein, Nie wird euch das Leben gewonnen sein."