Re: "Fix ATAPI transfer lengths" causes CD writing regression

[Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>]

On Wed, Oct 31 2007, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Jens Axboe wrote:
> >Right, that's of course problematic... There has to be a way to recover
> >that situation though, or you can't export any user command issue
> >facility.
> 
> You cannot hope to handle all possible effects arising from an app 
> providing an invalid sg header / cdb.
> 
> Once you start talking "recovery" you are already screwed:  we are 
> talking about low-level hardware commands that are passed straight to 
> the hardware.  It is trivial to lock up hardware, brick hardware, and 
> corrupt data at that level.
> 
> 
> If this is NOT a privileged app, we must update the command validation 
> to ensure that invalid commands are not transported to the hardware.
> 
> If this is a privileged app, our work is done.  Fix the app.  We gave 
> root rope, and he took it.

Woaw, back the truck up a bit :-)

I'm talking about simple things - like asking for 8 bytes of sense data.
Simple mistakes. You cannot possibly check for everything like that in a
command filter, it's utterly impossible.

> I even venture to say that "accept anything, clean up afterwards" is 
> /impossible/ to implement, in addition to being dangerous.

Certainly, that's not what I'm talking about.

-- 
Jens Axboe