Re: PATCH: /dev/nvram cleanups.

Philipp Rumpf (prumpf@suse.de)
Thu, 29 Jul 1999 18:54:53 +0200


> Rather than go by the manufacturer, woudln't you be better off identifying
> the BIOS ? (as that is what is primarily using the nvram).

I think we all would be better off not wasting our time with this...

> Agreed. Which is why I mentioned in an earlier mail that it doesn't
> belong in kernel space. To reiterate: Set the amount of exported data
> from /dev/nvram to the size of the biggest nvram that's known.
> Let applications that use it do the sizing.

Assume you wanted, for some reason, have a userspace application have access
to the nvram. You want it to store 50/114 bytes there that you don't have to
care about saving otherwise and can restore after a boot. You do not want
this application to be able to generate 8192 interrupts per second and mess
up some real-time processes timing.

a) do you want to auto-detect the NVRAM's size ? To make real use of it, you
have to get along with the BIOS anyway and then you should know the size of
the NVRAM.

b) if you can write the nvram, the whole test should not be difficult and does
not require long delays. I don't think we want to generally want to do that as
it is a real bad place for a system crash to occur.

Philipp Rumpf

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