Re: Porting OpenBSD's sysctl hw.sensors framework to FreeBSD

On Thursday 12 July 2007 03:00:08 am Alexander Leidinger wrote:
Quoting John Baldwin <jhb@xxxxxxxxxxx> (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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