[PATCH 00/10] Enhance /dev/mem to allow read/write of arbitrary physical addresses

On Fri, Jul 01, 2011 at 02:58:02PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:

So what was not mentioned in your series, what is *your* motivation 
and your usecase? Enabling closed-source userspace drivers? Enabling 
the crash utility?

He stated it pretty clearly in the thread, it's the crash utility.

If the former then shame on you, if the latter then how do you 
explain that distros appear to disable the RAM aspect of /dev/mem:

 $ grep DEVMEM $(rpm -ql kernel-2.6.38-0.rc7.git2.3.fc16.x86_64 | grep config-2.6 )
 CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM=y

So the crash utility use-case does not work on unpatched, default 
kernels, right?

Not if you have highmem.  That's why Redhat or Fedora to quote your
example patch in the /dev/crash driver, which totally defeats the
CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM setting.  But apparently it's good enough that no
one either noticed or at least doesn't care.