Andre Hedrick writes:
> On Fri, 21 Jul 2000, Dan Hollis wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 21 Jul 2000, James Sutherland wrote:
>
> I used a bad word of choice. I can not DISKTOBRICK.
> But can genrate code that will attempt and may have success.
> Regardless do you want access to such attempts available in the kernel?
> Unchecked?
Why is it that the disk controller can allow itself to be commanded to
destroy itself? For safety, the disk controller firmware shouldn't
allow any such thing to happen. Ian devices where you can erase and
reporgram the firmware, a good design has fixed firmware for reloading
the writable firmware, so you can't make the device unusable merely by
writing bad firmware into it. If the drive electronics or mechanism can
be physically damaged by certain commands, then they are badly designed.
It's not a matter of whether the kernel should allow such a thing; even
if the kernel itself doesn't allow such commands to be sent to the disk,
that isn't enough to prevent it from happening via other relatively
simple means.
The kernel simply can't be expected to protect hardware from itself. If
a piece of hardware can be made to destroy itself, it's bad hardware,
not bad kernel programming.
-
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/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 23 2000 - 21:00:17 EST