It tends to come down to "was the board designed by someone who felt it
shouldn't trash your PC". SGI get away with this because their MMIO stuff
isnt capable of trashing the machine. I'm hoping Matrox got this right
as XFree86 + the PI direct render work + Mesa is going to be really nice
if they did.
As regards the 3DFx doodoo driver, I would personally say the situation
the driver creates is potentially worse but not if set up carefully. It goes
from "root can install something stupid" to "any user can trash the box" in
the naive setup. But with your driver and group only access it becomes
setgid voodoo and thats yes - definitely a win
Alan
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