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Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2002 22:03:36 +0100
From: Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>
To: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: ISA slot detection on PCI systems?
Message-ID: <20020106220336.A30738@suse.cz>
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In-Reply-To: <a168fs$p9q$1@cesium.transmeta.com>; from hpa@zytor.com on Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 11:03:24PM -0800
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On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 11:03:24PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> > It's still not very nice for userspace apps to touch hardware directly,
> > even if it's just BIOS memory ...
> > 
> 
> Red herring.  It's not very nice for *applications* to not indirect
> through a driver, but if that driver is in userspace or kernel space
> is irrelevant.  Incidentally, "applications" here include a lot of the
> parsers that produce /proc output.  /proc/pci is occationally handy,
> but it is also an example on why you shouldn't do data reduction in
> kernel space unless you can avoid it.  Now /proc/bus/pci is available
> and contains all the data, however.

I don't propose having human-readable output of DMI data in /proc, just
the binary data much like /proc/bus/pci has. That isn't much bloat in
kernel, and is a clearly defined interface, unlike reading /dev/kmem.

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs
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