On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, James Sutherland wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Stephen Frost wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, James Sutherland wrote:
> >
> > > The proper interface will allow the very small handful of utilities which
> > > need to bypass these checks (to update firmware or whatever) to do so,
> > > while preventing other access.
> >
> > The proper interface... You mean like the nice clean interface
> > we currently have that will just be cluttered up by these attempts to
> > filter it?
>
> There is NOTHING "nice [and] clean" about the current abomination of "do
> everything in userland, however stupid". In the long term, it won't be
> "cluttered up", it will be removed and replaced by a sane interface which
> doesn't require the keys to the universe just to change the drive
> powersave settings.
We *don't* do *everything* in userland. We just allow access to
the raw side of the world from userland so that a program doesn't have
to do worse things to try and get the same access. The way it currently
is there is the possibility that a vendor wouldn't have to muck around
in the kernel to be able to upgrade the flash.
This keeps the vendor specific *junk* out of the kernel and in
userland. The kernel provides a nice clean interface to devices which
conform to the spec. Note that such raw access is, from what I can tell,
part of the spec, just the specific data sent using it isn't specified
in the spec and has been used by vendors to provide vendor-specific hooks,
which reminds me of 'SCSI generic'...
Stephen
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