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Retro Hardware and No Hardware

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 8th of July 2019 06:34:10 AM Filed under
Hardware
  • The Most Retro Way to Run Terminal Commands on Linux, Period

    The Lorzenz Lo15 is a 1930s teleprinter (also known teletype, teletypewriter, and TTY [TeleTYpe], the the latter being how the Unix TTY available in Linux distros got its name).

    These machines supported an early form of electronic communication that allowed typed messages to be sent and received over a network using Baudot, an early precursor to ASCII (which is the current character encoding standard for electronic communication).

    The machine features an early serial interface that, with the right know-how, can be mapped to USB (Lind explains more in a follow-up tweet), something a troupe of talented tech bods have taken advantage of over the years.

  • Matthew Garrett: Creating hardware where no hardware exists

    The laptop industry was still in its infancy back in 1990, but it still faced a core problem that we do today - power and thermal management are hard, but also critical to a good user experience (and potentially to the lifespan of the hardware). This is in the days where DOS and Windows had no memory protection, so handling these problems at the OS level would have been an invitation for someone to overwrite your management code and potentially kill your laptop. The safe option was pushing all of this out to an external management controller of some sort, but vendors in the 90s were the same as vendors now and would do basically anything to avoid having to drop an extra chip on the board. Thankfully(?), Intel had a solution.

    The 386SL was released in October 1990 as a low-powered mobile-optimised version of the 386. Critically, it included a feature that let vendors ensure that their power management code could run without OS interference. A small window of RAM was hidden behind the VGA memory[1] and the CPU configured so that various events would cause the CPU to stop executing the OS and jump to this protected region. It could then do whatever power or thermal management tasks were necessary and return control to the OS, which would be none the wiser. Intel called this System Management Mode, and we've never really recovered.

    Step forward to the late 90s. USB is now a thing, but even the operating systems that support USB usually don't in their installers (and plenty of operating systems still didn't have USB drivers). The industry needed a transition path, and System Management Mode was there for them. By configuring the chipset to generate a System Management Interrupt (or SMI) whenever the OS tried to access the PS/2 keyboard controller, the CPU could then trap into some SMM code that knew how to talk to USB, figure out what was going on with the USB keyboard, fake up the results and pass them back to the OS. As far as the OS was concerned, it was talking to a normal keyboard controller - but in reality, the "hardware" it was talking to was entirely implemented in software on the CPU.

    Since then we've seen even more stuff get crammed into SMM, which is annoying because in general it's much harder for an OS to do interesting things with hardware if the CPU occasionally stops in order to run invisible code to touch hardware resources you were planning on using, and that's even ignoring the fact that operating systems in general don't really appreciate the entire world stopping and then restarting some time later without any notification. So, overall, SMM is a pain for OS vendors.

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