Re:The low-down on LOADALL (1990)
by tenebrisalietum on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @02:36PM
(#25837781)
I think most of the chip testing facilities like LOADALL eventually got subsumed into the System Management Mode mechanism, triggered by "System Management Interrupts." It's become used by the portion of UEFI/BIOS firmware that's continually running in the background controlling fans and power, and has the ability to run completely hidden from the operating system by design.
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This is correct. The functionality of LOADALL now largely happens in the RSM instruction which returns back to normal execution context from an SMI. In modern firmware, before the SMI handler is invoked by the SMM dispatcher the firmware will switch the mode away from real mode and have its own GDT/descriptors. All this needs to be restored on SMI return thus RSM will parse a specially formatted block of processor context to dump everything back.