Re: Direct access to hardware

From: James Sutherland (jas88@cam.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jul 25 2000 - 13:23:39 EST


On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:

> James Sutherland <jas88@cam.ac.uk> writes:
> >On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Stephen Frost wrote:
> >> 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'...
> >
> >It's dangerous - and the only legitimate use of this "feature" is one
> >which shouldn't be done from within Linux in the first place.
>
> let me get this straight. are you saying that the "jaz" utility which
> lets me password-protect write access to my jaz disks should not exist
> under Linux ? this utility requires the ability to send that are
> vendor-and-device-specific SCSI commands to the drive.

That doesn't sound like a good implementation, but I doubt these commands
would be in the same category of command as the flash update ones. I'm
interested in the dangerous category, not the merely undocumented bits.

James.

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