Re: [PATCH 2.6.25] module: allow ndiswrapper to use GPL-onlysymbols

[Ingo Molnar]

* Pavel Roskin <proski@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> > btw., what are the technical reasons why ndiswrapper cannot be done 
> > in userspace, much like the (wildly successful) FUSE concept?
> 
> ndiswrapper contains essentially two drivers in one - PCI and USB.  
> The PCI driver uses DMA, which should be a strong argument for keeping 
> it in the kernel.

how exactly does it use DMA - how does it allocate the memory it later 
on DMAs into, and how does it typically program that DMA target - is 
there any control over that in the NDIS protocol - or will NDIS drivers 
just write random addresses to the mmio space and then the hardware does 
DMA to/from those addresses? [without the NDIS framework having any 
knowledge about the encoding of those bits?]

on modern hardware it might even be possible to jail an ndiswrapper 
driver to its own pages via the IOMMU.

	Ingo
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