[LAU] NOW - UEFI

[Len Ovens]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2014, Len Ovens wrote:

> I see what you mean, every time I thought I was getting somewhere, I got sent 
> to yet another page. The most I got out of it was that EFI is intel's answer 
> to grub but with more control of the firware settings at the same time. The 
> old bios included calls to access some of the HW, but no one used them as 
> they were not muti-task/user friendly. It appears EFI does the same thing and 
> windows uses it and Linux does not know how to access at least part of it. 
> (or windows sets up its own calls within it)

What I forgot to add, is that it is obvious that a larger part of this 
code sticks around and is still running after boot. At least with the bios 
that didn't seem to be true. Some of this code may be called by SMIs and 
of course the OS has less control of what is there. This code is not open 
source and aside from security considerations (inteligent ethernet IFs 
have that problem) RT performance may suffer.

I would suggest the xeon set of processors and MB may be more controlable 
just because the server market demands it be so. Turning SMIs off on these 
boards voids the warranty due to heat considerations, but my monitoring of 
temperature while in performance mode with all cores at 100% use on my 4 
core i5 has shown no problems. The temperature has remained well below the 
point speed reduction would be indicated. In fact ondemand can make things 
hotter, I found manually running one core at a lower speed actually 
increased the temperature. There are a lot of different xeon models and it 
is possible to get them with no HT or boost. I was thinking of getting 
such a MB, but could find none with PCI slots. I do not know if they would 
make better audio boards though. At the other end of the server market is 
the atom MB which are good headless audio machines (the graphics part is 
not linux friendly) using less power, cooling and being small besides. 
Many of these MB have one PCI slot and there are "L" adaptors that allow 
the card to use less space so an older (well supported) audio card could 
be used.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net