From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "H. Peter Anvin" Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:00:44 +0000 Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/10] Enhance /dev/mem to allow read/write of arbitrary Message-Id: <4E0DEF2C.3040504@zytor.com> List-Id: References: <201106171038.25988.ptesarik@suse.cz> <20110701144129.GA10052@infradead.org> <20110701144641.GA23272@elte.hu> <201107011654.06651.ptesarik@suse.cz> <20110701153634.GA27407@elte.hu> In-Reply-To: <20110701153634.GA27407@elte.hu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org On 07/01/2011 08:36 AM, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > So we could kill multiple birds with the same stone here: > > - remove various ugly uses of /dev/mem (including the rootkit usage), > with or without strict-devmem > > - extending it to above-4G for inspection purposes > > - allowing to kill /dev/mem access runtime similar to the > disable_modules lock-down killswitch, for the so inclined. > > Would you be interested in modifying your patch-set in such a > fashion? > There is another use that I have looked at, as well: for testing purposes, it would be extremely good to be able to dirty and/or flush an arbitrary physical cache line for testing purposes. This is very very similar to /dev/mem usage -- access to an arbitrary chunk of memory -- and a fully enabled /dev/mem can of course support this use (just mmap the page with the relevant cache line). However, it could also be a separate device which could have looser permissions than /dev/mem; or a set of ioctls on /dev/mem with a separate kill switch, because no data would ever be have modified or returned to user space. Either way, though, we found that it would share a lot of code with the /dev/mem implementation, and as such fixing up the underlying machinery is the sanest way to upstream this. -hpa -- H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center I work for Intel. I don't speak on their behalf.