Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 2 Jan 2002 23:12:44 +0100 (CET) | From | Dave Jones <> | Subject | Re: ISA slot detection on PCI systems? |
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On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > > Consider the lives of people administering large server farms or ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > > clusters. Their hardware is not necessarily homogenous, and the > > > ability to query the DMI tables on the fly could be useful both > > > for administration and automatic process migration. > > Given that 'dmidecode' works fine in those circumstances, that's still > > not a convincing argument imo. > But only for people and programs with root privileges. ^^^^^^ Someone building a new kernel for a box (ie administrator) will have root priveledges. Though running 'make guessconfig' or whatever as root would suck.
What Alan suggests (ripping the necessary bits out of dmidecode and making a setuid program) sounds better, as long as someone audits it afterwards.
> then, on whether we want to insist that all software doing hardware > probing must have root privileges to function.
probing isa isn't pretty. which is why we don't have anything as nice as /proc/bus/pci. The pnpbios support goes a little towards this, but only detects PNP cards obviously. Ye olde ISA is all but invisible to /proc
As we get the devicefs in 2.5 fleshed out, hopefully such things will come in time for the older busses like PNPISA & EISA
> There is already stuff in /proc that seems to be there for precisely this > reason. So /proc/dmi would hardly be a violation of norms.
Just because its a shitbucket, doesn't mean we should keep adding to it. It's become the dumping ground for so much crap that just doesn't need to be there.
-- | Dave Jones. http://www.codemonkey.org.uk | SuSE Labs
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