On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > Making that sort of thing available to userland is not a good idea, IMO.
>
> It's already availible, as others have mentioned. There are other
> ways to do it, this just provides a nice clean way instead of horrible
> hacks.
What horrible hacks? All that is needed in the kernel is a simple if
statement, to reject these commands. Anyway, Andre is now proposing to T13
that the drive itself enforce these limits, logging any violations to
invalidate the warranty. End of problem: the drive does it for us.
> > A vendor supplied bootdisk is completely OS neutral, since the OS is out
> > of the equation. I could use that bootdisk whether my main OS is Linux,
> > NT, FreeBSD, Netware, whatever I want.
>
> In the end, mainly this is because of the attempts to make it
> simple for the users.
Sorry, I can't parse that. WHAT is because of attemts to make WHAT simple
for users - the restriction to a specific platform group, just so users
can have a nice point&drool interface for firmware changes?
> > > This keeps the vendor specific *junk* out of the kernel and in
> > > userland.
> >
> > I'd rather keep it out completely.
>
> Personally, I like my CD burner.
WTF does that come in - we're talking about writing firmware in devices,
not writing to a CD-R. TOTALLY different issue.
> > It's dangerous - and the only legitimate use of this "feature" is one
> > which shouldn't be done from within Linux in the first place.
>
> There are other uses of this direct access I suspect, perhaps not
> as many under IDE as under SCSI, but they're there.
Such as? A handful of standard things the kernel should provide anyway
(powersave, DMA mode, etc), and a block of commands which MUST NOT be
issued to the drive EVER (except by the drive vendor's maintenance
software.)
James.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 31 2000 - 21:00:19 EST