ACPI Platform Runtime Mechanism Support Is Getting Underway For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ACPI Platform Runtime Mechanism Support Is Getting Underway For Linux

Platform Runtime Mechanism was incorporated into the ACPI 6.4 specification earlier this year and allows moving some system management interrupt (SMI) handlers out of the system management mode (SMM) "black box" and into the OS/VMM execution context. With Linux 5.14 initial work on ACPI Platform Runtime Mechanism is set to land...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ACPI-PRM-Linux-Started

[microcode]

Cool. It is progress.

[waxhead]

While I am not particularly interested in this story , this type of topics is very interesting. I don't mind more news in this direction.

[Vorpal]

This is really cool. It should help hard real time performance, such as for LinuxCNC. It is also good for security, as my understanding of this is that the code running will be somewhat more inspectable (at least in theory).

[mlau]

This is really cool. It should help hard real time performance, such as for LinuxCNC. It is also good for security, as my understanding of this is that the code running will be somewhat more inspectable (at least in theory).

As far as I understood it, it's the same black box code, but instead of running in SMM, it now runs in the context of the OS kernel, at the request of ACPI, almost like the bottom half
of a device driver interrupt. But as you said, that should help rt a bit, but it's still bios code, and bios writers aren't exactly known for writing good or even adequate code.