On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Lennart Poettering wrote: > In contrast to some other Linux network drivers (notably eepro100) > your 8139too 0.9.26 doesn't allow access to the link beat status when A few of my drivers (epic100) put the chip into power saving mode when the interface is down, but they all allow reading the status at any time. With the epic100 driver, the chip is brought out of power saving mode with the first ioctl() call. It's never proper for a general purpose driver to turn off link beat without a specific manual configuration. It is too easy to end up in a situation where neither side will generate link beat because it thinks its link partner is down. > Another related issue: Currently access to the link beat status via > SIOETHTOOL and SIOCGMII* is not allowed for normal users. The proper semantics are for the reads to be generally allowed, and writes to require capable(CAP_NET_ADMIN), which is translated to suser() for older kernels. > is even a certain inconsistency and security issue: the older > SIOGDEVPRIVATE ioctls (including those for modifying MII registers) > work for normal users, since the security checks in net/core/dev.c > only work for SIOCETHTOOL and SIOCGMII*, not for SIODEVPRIVATE; they > are passed untested to the specific driver, which doesn't check for > security any further. (at least 8139too doesn't do so) Check my unmodified drivers: they handle the security. That's pretty much the best way to handle the issue, since it's possible some chip might -- Donald Becker becker@scyld.com Scyld Computing Corporation http://www.scyld.com 410 Severn Ave. Suite 210 Scyld Beowulf cluster system Annapolis MD 21403 410-990-9993 - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
