From: "Andrew McNabb" <amcnabb@argus-systems.com>
> Let me try to understand what you're saying...
> It is established that a system's interface allows programs to
> physically destroy a disk drive, without providing any benefit
> whatsoever. However, since it's possible to fry other hardware,
> too, why bother with this problem???
..allows root programs to physically...
Regular users have no such access.
> The fact of the matter is, that it is wrong for a program to
> destroy hardware. It is the kernel's job to ensure that it
> can't. It is pure laziness to ignore the issue.
The point is that it is impossible for the kernel to ensure
that root cannot fry the hardware. All it can do is make it very
difficult. root is always allowed to access the hardware directly.
> My feeling is that we should try to avoid all possible ways of
> accidentally or maliciously breaking parts. We can start out
> by fixing the IDE subsystem, and then go on to others. Just
> because other stuff is broken, too, doesn't mean that we should
> give up.
Other stuff is "broken" in the same way. I believe it's an artifact
of the firmware architecture, but I could be wrong.
..Stu
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 23 2000 - 21:00:16 EST