Re: [PATCH 2.6.25] module: allow ndiswrapper to use GPL-only symbols

Ingo Molnar
2008-03-05T13:21:48Z

* Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz> wrote:

> On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> > > Ingo, i's simply not possible to put ndiswrapper in user-space sanely.
> > > Drivers are drivers. They'll want (shared) interrupts, they want DMA,
> > > they want to do things like cli/sti.
> > yeah, i agree that putting it into userspace is quite insane.
> > it might possible to do it halfways sanely via existing arch/x86/kvm/
> > infrastructure though. VMX/SVM context will properly emulate the IRQ
> > flag so cli/sti will work fine, and as long as DMA is properly
> > quarantined via an iommu it might even not corrupt the rest of the
> > system.
>
> This definitely could be a [hackish] way to go. The remarkable
> drawback is that it will not work on CPUs without virtualization
> extensions.

by the time it's implemented and trickles into distributions the
majority of PCs will have virtualization extensions.

Ingo