[PATCH 00/10] Enhance /dev/mem to allow read/write of arbitrary physical addresses

[Ingo Molnar]

* Petr Tesarik <ptesarik at suse.cz> wrote:

> > Do you expect distros to enable this boot option by default? I.e. 
> > would SuSE be willing to ship with a restrictive /dev/mem by 
> > default? That's really the wider goal we want to work towards.
> 
> I'm not really the decision-maker on this, but even though I don't 
> need it for crash, there are several other users which would have 
> to be fixed:
> 
> 1. hwinfo (EFI, MPTABLE and ACPI table parsing, analyzing video BIOS)
> 2. dmidecode (SMBIOS, DMI)
> 3. possibly others

But those tables wont be in regular RAM (they will be in ROM or in 
RAM marked non-RAM in a special way in the e820 tables).

dmidecode certainly works on Fedora.

> > Hm, why would the ability "dirty and/or flush an arbitrary 
> > physical cache line for testing purposes" be a DoS?
> 
> Effectively switching off CPU caches can slow things down quite a 
> bit... especially on a large SMP system. ;)

Flushing a cacheline isnt switching it off. You can already 'flush' 
the cache from user-space as well, by trashing it for example. So i 
don't see the DoS angle.

Thanks,

	Ingo