On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 6:01 AM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thursday 31 March 2011, Andrei Warkentin wrote: >> Well, there are less esoteric ways of turning something into a >> paperweight =). No, the whole point of adding the device partition >> support is so you don't have to go through hoops to read and write >> them. > > Agreed. > >> The scenario where it matters (embedded Linux devices booting through >> boot partitions) are such, that if you went through sufficient hoops >> to get root access, and can build and boot a kernel to enable these >> options for that device, then you must know what you're doing, and a >> warning message in the Kconfig help is sufficient. The generic case of >> people sticking cards into a PCI SDHCI controller under Ubuntu is such >> that you can do no real damage. > > One possible way of dealing with this would be to make the boot partition > a character device instead of a block device. That would still allow > you to overwrite it, but make it very obvious that you cannot mount or > partition it. > > On the other hand, it would be a rather esoteric interface, since the > hardware is still fundamentally block based, we just use it in a different > way. > Plus what if you do intend to have a file system there? Other than complexity and non-obvious usage, I don't see anything gained by this. I wouldn't worry about ways of misusing this. As I've said, in the only case it matters (some embedded device booting from the boot partition), the user would have to gain root access, build a kernel giving access to the boot partitions and be able to boot into it. So a warning in Kconfig is sufficient. If you guys feel concerned, then we can add another Kconfig option that will allow write access to the boot partitions. A -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-mmc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
