> I am reminded of the catch-22 that results from loading products like
> Direct-X to a M$ environment. Enabling direct access to hardware often
> results in instability and system crashes, which anyone who loads the
> above product on a Windows 9x box can testify to after a program in
> userspace brings the whole system down, ad infinitum ad nauseum.
Raw IO isn't direct access to hardware, it's direct access to the hardware
_driver_. A user program with permission to access a raw device won't be
able to cause system instability any more than a user program with
permission to access a file. Indeed, the file access case has many more
layers of code to go through.
The classic example of allowing userspace direct access to hardware is X -
another lovely can of worms.
Chris
-
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/