* Ryan Mallon <rmallon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 17/06/11 19:30, Ingo Molnar wrote: > >* Petr Tesarik<ptesarik@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > >>This patch series enhances /dev/mem, so that read and write is > >>possible at any address. The patchset includes actual > >>implementation for x86. > >This series lacks a description of why this is desired. > > > >My strong opinion is that it's not desired at all: /dev/mem never > >worked beyond 4G addresses so by today it has become largely obsolete > >and is on the way out really. > > > >I'm aware of these current /dev/mem uses: > > > > - Xorg maps below 4G non-RAM addresses and the video BIOS > > > > - It used to have some debugging role but these days kexec and kgdb > > has largely taken over that role - partly due to the 4G limit. > > > > - there's some really horrible out-of-tree drivers that do mmap()s > > via /dev/mem, those should be fixed if they want to move beyond > > 4G: their char device should be mmap()able. > > There are drivers where this makes sense. For example an FPGA > device with a proprietary register layout on the memory bus can be > done this way. [...] So you want us to help vendors screw users with insane, proprietary, user-space drivers with sekrit binary blobs? Wow. Thanks, Ingo -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ia64" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html