Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:04:33 -0400 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@leidinger.net> Cc: Rui Paulo <rpaulo@fnop.net>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>, "Constantine A. Murenin" <cnst@freebsd.org>, Shteryana Shopova <syrinx@freebsd.org>, Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Porting OpenBSD's sysctl hw.sensors framework to FreeBSD Message-ID: <200707121404.34168.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <20070712090008.yc6d6zptwkow04oc@webmail.leidinger.net> References: <55754.1184143579@critter.freebsd.dk> <200707111145.27741.jhb@freebsd.org> <20070712090008.yc6d6zptwkow04oc@webmail.leidinger.net>
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On Thursday 12 July 2007 03:00:08 am Alexander Leidinger wrote: > Quoting John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> (from Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:45:26 -0400): > > > On Wednesday 11 July 2007 07:49:59 am Alexander Leidinger wrote: > > >> On the other hand you don't want to allow an userland tool to directly > >> mess around with the registers on your RAID or NIC to get some status... > > > > Err, that's how all the RAID utilities I've used work. They send firmware > > commands from userland and parse the replies in userland. One exception I've > > That's sad... they should provide this functionality in the driver > instead, it would allow to use access restrictions for some parts. Not really, it avoids having to duplicate a lot of work in drivers that can be written once in a cross-platform userland utility. Drivers aren't really the place to be monitoring raid status sending pages, e-mails, etc. It's best to let userland invoke sendmail, not the kernel. :) > > seen so far is that for software RAID the firmware you are talking to is the > > driver, not firmware on the card, so you use ioctls directly rather than an > > ioctl that sends a command to the firmware on the card. > > But you have to run this tool as root, don't you? You don't want to > let a user run such a tool (and nowadays even desktops start to have > RAID, so whoever sits at the machine may be interested to see some > status on his desktop). Whatever talks directly to the driver needs to run as root, yes, but you could always write a proxy app that receives requests from utilities running as non-root and does its own access restrictions. -- John Baldwin
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