From owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jul 12 18:05:48 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BBB1F16A400; Thu, 12 Jul 2007 18:05:48 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jhb@freebsd.org) Received: from server.baldwin.cx (66-23-211-162.clients.speedfactory.net [66.23.211.162]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 419B913C4C4; Thu, 12 Jul 2007 18:05:48 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jhb@freebsd.org) Received: from localhost.corp.yahoo.com (john@localhost [127.0.0.1]) (authenticated bits=0) by server.baldwin.cx (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id l6CI5iYB095452; Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:05:46 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from jhb@freebsd.org) From: John Baldwin To: Alexander Leidinger Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:04:33 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.6 References: <55754.1184143579@critter.freebsd.dk> <200707111145.27741.jhb@freebsd.org> <20070712090008.yc6d6zptwkow04oc@webmail.leidinger.net> In-Reply-To: <20070712090008.yc6d6zptwkow04oc@webmail.leidinger.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200707121404.34168.jhb@freebsd.org> X-Greylist: Sender succeeded SMTP AUTH authentication, not delayed by milter-greylist-2.0.2 (server.baldwin.cx [127.0.0.1]); Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:05:46 -0400 (EDT) X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV 0.88.3/3648/Thu Jul 12 12:59:27 2007 on server.baldwin.cx X-Virus-Status: Clean X-Spam-Status: No, score=-4.4 required=4.2 tests=ALL_TRUSTED,AWL,BAYES_00 autolearn=ham version=3.1.3 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.3 (2006-06-01) on server.baldwin.cx Cc: Rui Paulo , Poul-Henning Kamp , "Constantine A. Murenin" , Shteryana Shopova , Robert Watson , freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Porting OpenBSD's sysctl hw.sensors framework to FreeBSD X-BeenThere: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussion related to FreeBSD architecture List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 18:05:48 -0000 On Thursday 12 July 2007 03:00:08 am Alexander Leidinger wrote: > Quoting John Baldwin (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