Wow! A hole in linuxbios PCI mastery setup?

[Kevin Hester]

Smart.  I'll fix the driver rather than doing the Award work around.  Ollie, 
thanks for checking the spec.

On Tuesday 14 January 2003 06:54, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
> 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