On Tue, 19 Feb 2008 07:42:03 +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: > > > Maybe Christian's patch can be improved to not do the check on these? > > As long as /dev/port exists, it seems reasonable that the kernel should > > behave, no matter what I/O ports are accessed from user-space. > > nonsense. > > /dev/mem exists for example, but you are still not supposed to go > bang all over the place in it.
You should at least be able to read from it without crashing the machine. Of course writing is a different story. > > > I hate that sensors_detect.. or for that matter any other userland code > > > that pokes random ports like that. It should die. > > > > What do you propose as a replacement? > > Dunno, something less scary, like knowing where your sensors are on a > given machine... You mean, having a complete database for the, what, 4000 PC motherboards out there? And maintaining it day after day? _This_ sounds much scarier to me than the current situation. > honestly, it's just scary the risk you guys are taking > by banging random IO ports. I don't remember anyone reporting problems with this in the past 3 or 4 years, so it doesn't seem to be a big problem in practice. > At the very least, that shouldn't be done on non-x86. I am surprised that anyone would actually run sensors-detect on non-x86... Non-PC hardware usually doesn't have sensors driven by "hwmon" drivers anyway, or people know what they have and do not need detection. But I would be totally fine with updating sensors-detect to skip some of the probes on non-x86 hardware. There are basically 3 /dev/port probes that are done currently: * Super-I/O chips at 0x2e/0x2f and 0x4e/0x4f. * Legacy PC hardware monitoring chips at 0x290-0x297. * IPMI interface at 0x0ca3 and 0x0cab (read-only). Please tell me which ones should be skipped on PowerPC. Christian, can you tell me which of these probes caused trouble for you? > > And how is userland code poking at random ports different from kernel > > code poking at random ports? We could move sensors-detect inside the > > kernel (and I have some plan to do that) but I fail to see how this > > would solve this particular problem. > > It wouldn't, but at least I could NAK it or make it CONFIG_X86 :-) The same could be done for user-space (or at the /dev/port level.) -- Jean Delvare _______________________________________________ Linuxppc-dev mailing list Linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org https://ozlabs.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxppc-dev
