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Date:      Fri, 14 Nov 1997 07:36:10 -0500 (EST)
From:      "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net>
To:        dg@root.com
Cc:        henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Pentium lockup fix in FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <199711141236.HAA00884@dyson.iquest.net>
In-Reply-To: <199711140710.XAA29918@implode.root.com> from David Greenman at "Nov 13, 97 11:10:23 pm"

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David Greenman said:
>
>    With above said, I need to make one more important point. I have absolutely
> no problem with people coming up with a workaround for this, no matter how
> disgusting, if it does the job and doesn't harm people further. I fully
> support them making such a workaround available to anyone who wants it.
> HOWEVER, I do strongly object to the notion that such a hack should be brought
> into the FreeBSD source code repository at the first sign of life. Doing so
> would be a poor mode of operation in general and we must avoid this if we
> stand any chance of maintaining the high quality of our source tree. This
> is a policy issue that I believe enjoys full support of the entire FreeBSD
> core team.
> 
Yes.  I also greatly respect/appreciate the work that people have done to
try to create a fix.  I think that we should not tell people that we have
fixed the problem, only to leave a more subtile hole in the system for
some hacker to take advantage of, or perhaps destablize the system in
some way that none of us will easily understand.  It is not a good idea
to tell an ISP, for example, that we have fixed the problem, when we
really have not.

Remember, we will likely have to change both -stable and -current, and
we need to be especially careful with -stable in representing the fix
status.

I think that we all can understand the panic (no pun) that people might feel
about this problem.

-- 
John
dyson@freebsd.org
jdyson@nc.com



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