Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: is killing zombies possible w/o a reboot? | From | Doug McNaught <> | Date | Wed, 03 Nov 2004 20:56:28 -0500 |
| |
Russell Miller <rmiller@duskglow.com> writes:
> Wouldn't it help with device driver problems? Couldn't ring 1 be > used to make sure an errant driver doesn't drop the kernel, at least > on x86 machines?
As I understand it:
1) Ring transitions aren't free. 2) The API between drivers and kernel is always in flux; drivers expect to be able to access internal kernel data structures. Making drivers run in ring 1 on even one of the N architectures would be a major refactoring and would constrain API changes. Freezing the internal API is something the developers don't want to do. 3) There are probably plenty of ways for a buggy driver to crash the kernel even if it's running in ring 1 (turn off interrupts and leave them off, etc).
So the upshot is that it's probably not worth the work and portability hassles.
-Doug - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |