They were added because this was how the X server got IO permissions a
million years ago. It comes from some random old UNIX/386 thing, it
predates Linux itself as far as I know.
I'm fairly certain that X itself no longer uses it at all, but there may
be other programs that still do (unlikely). Your patch looks sane,
although it might be equally sane to just remove the code altogether.
Linus
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