Re: [patch] My AMD IDE driver, v2.7

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:

>
>On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
>>Your first question is really philosophical.  I think that people should
>>-not- be able to send undocumented commands through the interface...
>> and in this area IMO it pays to be paranoid.
>>
>
>What if the command is perfectly documented, but only for a certain class
>of IBM disks?
>
>Are you going to create a table of every disk out there, along with every
>command it can do?
>
>Remember: the kernel driver is a driver for the host controller, yet the
>command is for the _disk_. It makes no sense to check for disk commands in
>a host controller driver - they are two different things.
>
>It's like checking for icmp messages in a network driver. Do you seriously
>propose having network drivers check icmp messages for command validity?
>
See my other message, and thanks for making this analogy :)

I -do- know the distrinction between hosts and devices.  I think there 
should be -some- way, I don't care how, to filter out those unknown 
commands (which may be perfectly valid for a small subset of special IBM 
drives).  The net stack lets me do filtering, I want to sell you on the 
idea of letting the ATA stack do the same thing.

You have convinced me that unconditional filtering is bad.  But I still 
think people should be provided the option to filter if they so desire.

    Jeff