MSR driver

Stephan Meyer (Stephan.Meyer@pobox.com)
Thu, 13 Nov 1997 18:13:33 +0100 (MET)


I've sent this message to David S. Miller and Linus Torvalds
before, but obviously neither of them was willing to reply.

-------

I'd like to know which requirements the MSR driver needs to meet in order
to get included in the 2.1.x and 2.2.x kernels. I have received some
suggestions now and I myself can't really decide on the quality of each
solution.

a) character device

This is the currently implemented method.
It was criticized by Linus and I get the problem. I believe that
this way, it would be very easy to grant specific users access to
the MSR registers.

b) character device (s.o.) + ioctl

Would it be good to implement some stuff via the ioctl functions?

c) /proc/sys + sysctl

Would this do any good? You could probably write to a file to
select the MSR register/performance counter and then read from
it. I'd love to do it that way, but access would be restricted
to root. Is that okay?

Please add your thoughts on this.

- Stephan

------------------------------------------------
Stephan.Meyer@pobox.com
meyerst@informatik.uni-muenchen.de
http://pobox.com/~stephan.meyer/
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