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

Jiri Kosina
2008-03-04T23:32:38Z

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.

--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs