On 2004-12-10, Mark Studebaker wrote: > IMHO the eeprom driver is more of a demonstration driver than one of > great and obvious value, so achieving consensus on the value of > sub-features (checksum, Vaio) is difficult, and performace concerns are > secondary. This has certainly been true when the driver was first written and then maintained as a driver of the lm_sensors project, and was only used for memory module EEPROMs. However, we now start seeing more different natures of EEPROMs (proprietary on laptops, ethernet devices to name only two of them) for which the eeprom driver can be useful. Remember that a number of people even asked for write support in the driver (and this might as well happen in the future). > So I don't see any value removing the code. If you want to make it > super-clean shouldn't the Vaio stuff come out too? > But I'm sure you'll disagree... I would be happy to remove all Vaio stuff if there were no security concern in doing so. Unfortunately it happens that Vaio EEPROMs contain passwords in a very lightly encoded form and I thought that we didn't want every user of the system to be able to read it. If there is a better way to achieve the same goal, I'd gladly hear about it. I can also get rid of the test altogether if a majority of people think it's not necessary to hide the machine password from users - after all, only a limited number of machines are Vaio laptops, of which a limited number actually have a system password set, of which a limited number have more than one user, of which a limited number have untrusted users. The value of removing the code is, unsurprisingly, to reduce the amount of code to maintain and the amount of memory used by the driver when loaded. I am also trying to comply with the kernel rules about what belongs to the kernel-space and what belongs to the user-space. Thanks, -- Jean Delvare
