> > As for the original purpose of taints, I'm not aware of any > > problems with MSR access or port IO causing excessive > > kernel oops reports. Are you?
I'm not. From the bugzilla trends I don't think its a major cause, and we can usually root out the "user with dumb external module" problem already. > Really? Either one can be used to modify the running kernel (or > microcode), and possibly even destroy hardware. At least on x86 I would hope not the latter at least on modern systems. So the most irritating thing you can do is probably rootkit the box. It's not as if you can't rootkit a typical distribution shipping Linux system half a dozen other simpler ways than using I/O ports. Besides which once someone has rootkitted your box it won't show the taint anyway ! As a security measure the tainting is next to useless. As a debug aid it's potentially handy. > > If there are none I don't think it makes sense. > > > > At least personally I use MSR accesses quite frequently > > for benign purposes. > But how much of that is just reading MSR's, and of the writes, how much > are either debugging or things that the average user isn't ever going to do? Most of the uses are benign and sensible things like power monitoring tools. Alan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
