Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 25 Jul 2000 15:50:22 +0100 (BST) | From | James Sutherland <> | Subject | Re: Direct access to hardware |
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On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Stephen Frost wrote:
> We *don't* do *everything* in userland. We just allow access to > the raw side of the world from userland so that a program doesn't have > to do worse things to try and get the same access. The way it currently > is there is the possibility that a vendor wouldn't have to muck around > in the kernel to be able to upgrade the flash.
Making that sort of thing available to userland is not a good idea, IMO. Apart from anything else, I do NOT want to see Linux tools for upgrading firmware etc. for exactly the same reasons I don't want to see Windows ones: Why assume/require that I am running Linux or Windows?
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.
> This keeps the vendor specific *junk* out of the kernel and in > userland.
I'd rather keep it out completely.
> The kernel provides a nice clean interface to devices which conform to > the spec. Note that such raw access is, from what I can tell, part of > the spec, just the specific data sent using it isn't specified in the > spec and has been used by vendors to provide vendor-specific hooks, > which reminds me of 'SCSI generic'...
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.
James.
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