From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Matt Mackall Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 22:23:13 +0000 Subject: Re: [RFC] prevent "dd if=/dev/mem" crash Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 04:10:36PM -0600, Bjorn Helgaas wrote: > I expect there are probably different opinions about the idea > that "dd if=/dev/mem" exits without doing anything. Sparc and > 68K have nearby code that bit-buckets writes and returns zeroes > for reads of page zero. We could do that, too, but it seems like > kind of a hack, and holes on ia64 can be BIG (on the order of > 256GB for one box). I don't see any reason not to returns zeros. A hole in a file does the same thing, after all. The fact that the hole is big makes no difference. -- Matt Mackall : http://www.selenic.com : Linux development and consulting