[Hardeneddrivers-discuss] RE: [cgl_discussion] Some Initial Comments
on DDH-Spec-0.5h.pdf
Jeff Garzik
jgarzik at pobox.com
Tue Sep 24 00:01:14 PDT 2002
Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Oh, and don't forget that the hardware specification that drivers are
> written to, many times are not generally available greatly reducing
> the pool of capable people who have the opportunity to review the and
> debug the drivers. I would make it a requirement for a hardened
> driver that both the code and the hardware documentation be publicly
> available so the code can easily be reviewed by as many people as wish
> to.
This is a good point that bears highlighting. Donald Becker's [and thus
the kernel's] eepro100.c had certain bugs for years, simply because
access to Intel E100 hardware docs was damn near impossible to obtain.
I don't see driver hardening being very feasible on such drivers, where
the vendor refuses to allow kernel engineers access needed to get their
hardware working and stable. [why vendors want crappy Linux support,
I'll never know]
Jeff
P.S. In all fairness, Intel is doing a really good job maintaining the
e100 and e1000 drivers nowadays, and e100 docs should be public very
soon. [e1000 docs? who knows...]
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