Wow! A hole in linuxbios PCI mastery setup?
Ronald G. Minnich
rminnich at lanl.gov
Tue Jan 14 09:42:00 CET 2003
we don't turn on bus master as that could be very hazardous to your health
-- imagine an unitialized PCI device coming up with bus master enabled. It
is at that point allowed to do DMA cycles to RAM without having been
initialized by a driver. OUCH.
In my opinion if the driver is not turning on bus master it is a buggy
driver. If the device comes up with bus master enabled it is a buggy
device. Ollie has pointed this out too. There's a lot of buggy PCI
hardware in existence.
I think the Award BIOS is buggy, possibly intentionally, to deal with
buggy drivers (there are lots of BIOS patches that are in there, I am
told, to fix buggy device drivers in Windows).
I would recommend fixing the 802.11 driver, rather than modifying
LinuxBIOS. But let's see what other people say.
ron
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