HDIO_GETGEO accessibility (was Re: [PATCH] 2.5.24 IDE 95 (fwd))

[Petr Vandrovec]

On Sun, Jun 30, 2002 at 06:52:58PM +0200, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> 
> I hope you dont mind Petr.

No problem.
 
But I have one, unrelated... Today I found that VMware does not run
on 2.5.24 with rawdisks for non-root users because of ioctl(hdd, HDIO_GETGEO, ...)
is guarded by "if (!capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN)) return -EACCES;". And so it
fails although user has read-write access to /dev/hdX.

Is this change really intentional? It is GET, not SET operation, and user has
access to /dev/hdX. If this change is intentional, I'll recommend VMware
to gain priviledges around disk geometry accesses, but I do not think that
user should need SYS_ADMIN for retrieving disk geometry.
					Thanks,
						Petr Vandrovec
						[e-mail]