Hello,
I have a quandry that I would like wider assistance to resolve:-
Last week I replaced my old mini-ITX motherboard, based on an Intel Atom N270, with a newer board based on an AMD C60.
The power usage works out slightly lower, and I now have CPU virtualization available. However, after testing with the Xen Community Platform I found that a very useful feature for use with VMs, I/O Virtualization (IOMMU), was not available.
With investigation, I have determined that this feature is enabled through the presence of the "DMAR" table in ACPI. Now, I have too much of my life left to live to mess with ACPI, but apparently this is controlled by the UEFI firmware.
There is no option for IOMMU in my board firmware's setup. However, I have read up on a board from a different manufacturer which apparently does provide this feature. Both firmwares are AMI Aptio based. They are different sizes however: my board has a 32Mb flash (4 MB), the other board has half that.
UEFI firmwares consist of different modules, so the question is, what chance have I got to obtain IOMMU by swapping one or more modules? Given near identical hardware, would this be dangerous?