* Petr Tesarik [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Do you expect distros to enable this boot option by default? I.e. 
would SuSE be willing to ship with a restrictive /dev/mem by 
default? That's really the wider goal we want to work towards.

I'm not really the decision-maker on this, but even though I don't 
need it for crash, there are several other users which would have 
to be fixed:

1. hwinfo (EFI, MPTABLE and ACPI table parsing, analyzing video BIOS)
2. dmidecode (SMBIOS, DMI)
3. possibly others

But those tables wont be in regular RAM (they will be in ROM or in 
RAM marked non-RAM in a special way in the e820 tables).

dmidecode certainly works on Fedora.

quoted

Hm, why would the ability "dirty and/or flush an arbitrary 
physical cache line for testing purposes" be a DoS?

Effectively switching off CPU caches can slow things down quite a 
bit... especially on a large SMP system. ;)

Flushing a cacheline isnt switching it off. You can already 'flush' 
the cache from user-space as well, by trashing it for example. So i 
don't see the DoS angle.

Thanks,

	Ingo