Re: ISA slot detection on PCI systems?

Vojtech Pavlik
2002-01-06T21:04:01Z

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 11:03:24PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> > It's still not very nice for userspace apps to touch hardware directly,
> > even if it's just BIOS memory ...
> >
>
> Red herring. It's not very nice for *applications* to not indirect
> through a driver, but if that driver is in userspace or kernel space
> is irrelevant. Incidentally, "applications" here include a lot of the
> parsers that produce /proc output. /proc/pci is occationally handy,
> but it is also an example on why you shouldn't do data reduction in
> kernel space unless you can avoid it. Now /proc/bus/pci is available
> and contains all the data, however.

I don't propose having human-readable output of DMI data in /proc, just
the binary data much like /proc/bus/pci has. That isn't much bloat in
kernel, and is a clearly defined interface, unlike reading /dev/kmem.

--
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs