Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 25 Jul 2000 12:44:20 -0400 (EDT) | From | Stephen Frost <> | Subject | Re: Direct access to hardware |
| |
On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, James Sutherland wrote:
> 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.
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.
> 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.
In the end, mainly this is because of the attempts to make it simple for the users.
> > 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.
> > 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.
There are other uses of this direct access I suspect, perhaps not as many under IDE as under SCSI, but they're there.
Stephen
- 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/
| |