Re: [PATCH] Slightly safer Magic SysRq

Peter Benie (pjb1008@cam.ac.uk)
Wed, 13 Oct 1999 17:47:58 +0100


Guest section DW writes ("Re: [PATCH] Slightly safer Magic SysRq"):
> (ii) The reason SysRq exists is that people want to use the keyboard in some
> emergency cases, when something went very wrong. It is a human interface,
> not a software interface.

It's at least two interfaces. There's the "Something went wrong" keys,
which covers most of them, and there's the Secure Attention Key.

SAK (or an equivalent mechanism) is important for guaranteeing that
you have a genuine login prompt - it shouldn't be on such an obscure
key combination; it has a completely different purpose from the other
SysRq keys.

Last time this came up on the list, it was suggested that the SAK be
implemented in user-space. Nice if you can do it, but nobody said how
they would implement it without help from the kernel.

Peter

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