> > 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 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/