On Fri, 2 Oct 2009, David Vrabel wrote: > > There might be programs which really _do_ want to unbind other > > programs, so ruling out that capability in the kernel is likely to be a > > mistake. My preference is to let userspace sort this out. > > If we do want to allow this behaviour we certainly don't want user B > able to disconnect the usbfs driver from a device in use by user A. That's supposed to be handled by the permissions on the usbfs device files. Under normal circumstances a user can't open the file for writing without superuser privileges. If A and B both have the appropriate permissions then it isn't up to the kernel to tell them that they can't duke it out over device ownership. Deciding who owns what and when is _their_ job. Even the notion of "port ownership" that was recently added to usbfs doesn't affect the user interface. It changes only the way the kernel tries to probe drivers automatically. Alan Stern -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html