Relax permissions for reading hard drive serial number?

[Dan Kegel]

On 2000-09-07, in
http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=96836765403118&w=2, Linus wrote:
> Hmm.. I have this feeling that it would be much nicer to
> just implement the NT system calls directly.
> ...
> I wouldn't be adverse to supporting Wine better...

A few years on, Wine has matured to the point where it's
ready to run quite a few apps, even some protected by Safedisc.
One sticking point is that apps like Photoshop and probably
Punkbuster want to retrieve the hard drive's serial number,
but Linux restricts access to that info:
$ ls -l /proc/ide/hda/identify
-r-------- 1 root root 0 2007-11-29 07:05 /proc/ide/hda/identify
(And even if /proc/ide goes away, the other ways of retrieving
this info are similarly restricted to root.)

Any reason the access control on this info shouldn't be eased a bit,
e.g. make /proc/ide/*/identify be mode 444?

An alternative might be for Wine to simply fake the serial number,
but I would like to avoid that if possible.

See also http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10018
- Dan
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