Re: [PATCH] intel-iommu: Work around yet another BIOS bug

From: David Woodhouse
Date: Thu Aug 20 2009 - 17:56:25 EST


On Thu, 2009-08-20 at 15:47 -0600, Grant Grundler wrote:
>
> Could that be to reserve address space that the "disabled" IOMMU
> might still be responding to?
>
> Ie the BIOS hides the control registers so the OS won't talk to the
> device but the IOMMU might still attempt to lookup certain address
> ranges.
>
> I'm more inclined to believe it's sloppiness on the part of the BIOS
> writers but thought this might be an alternative explanation.

Nah, this is just the normal story: "We smoked too much crack and fried
our brains, and we don't do any QA on the crap we write because that
would leave fewer hours in the day for us to service our crack habit".

We _really_ need open source firmware.

Or at _least_ firmware written by competent engineers -- but I think
we've all fairly much given up on that happening by now?

--
dwmw2

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