Re: Direct access to hardware

From: Marc Lehmann (pcg@goof.com)
Date: Mon Jul 24 2000 - 07:52:40 EST


On Mon, Jul 24, 2000 at 10:48:36AM +0100, James Sutherland <jas88@cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> suitable for ye olde CRT, ye olde CRT just rejects it and starts flashing
> a little LED on the front. Only valid signals get through.

Rubbish. Only a subset of monitors do that. And what's worse, just
because my belinea 10-70-95 seems to ignore invalid signals *most of the
time*, you can fry it within 6 seconds by switching from 1600x1200x70 to
320x200x50 and back with exactly the right timing. Can easily be done with
xfree, as I have shown repeatedly. A lot of monitors are designed that
poorly.

You mustn't generalize from "my monitor is sane" to "every monitor is sane".

And there is _no_ way to verify this.

> Now, the drive CANNOT tell which commands are "valid" and which are not -
> so the OS must do it for the drive.

Again, the OS cannot decide that. Besides, "flash new firmware" *is* a
valid command for the drive.

Besides, almost every new invention started as a "non-standard"
extension. Linux shouldn't mindlessly inhibit innovation.

-- 
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      ---==---(_)__  __ ____  __       Marc Lehmann      +--
      --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ /       pcg@opengroup.org |e|
      -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\       XX11-RIPE         --+
    The choice of a GNU generation                       |
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