Evaluating SMI (System Management Interrupt) latency on Linux-CentOS/Intel machine

Question

I am interested in evaluating the behavior (latency, frequency) of SMI handling on Linux machine running CentOS and used for a (very) soft real time application.

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Answer 1

Actually, SMI is used for more than just keyboard emulation. Servers use SMI to report and correct ECC memory errors, ACPI uses SMI to communicate with BIOS and perform some tasks, even enabling and disabling ACPI is done through SMI, BIOS often intercepts power state changes through SMI... there's more, this is just a few examples.