Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 12 Mar 1999 10:12:27 -0800 | From | Daryll Strauss <> | Subject | Re: 3Dfx security issues |
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On Fri, Mar 12, 1999 at 06:47:51PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote: > 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.
I think you haven't worked on an SGIs enough. We've seen many applications crash the machine. We've got one at DD currently. A gamma application, when you set the gamma to 0, your Onyx will crash. I suspect SGI gets away with it, because no one has tried writing random data to their boards. :-)
> 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
Yes, if the person installing the device didn't read the README, they could be worse off. I would hope that root installing a new device would be at least as careful as installing a program setuid. The README warned the user that you could crash the box with the device and to restrict access appropriately. That's why I would never want it in the standard kernel, as it would be too easy to just throw it in without understanding the issues.
- |Daryll
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