rdmsr from userspace

[Andriy Gapon]

on 18/05/2008 21:32 Rui Paulo said the following:
> 
> Yes, but I still don't like having everything mixed up in one driver. At 
> the very least, I would like us to have two drivers. One for the 
> microcode update and the other driver for the rest.
> 
> I would like to see a microcode update utility (driver + something to 
> parse Intel's file aka devcpu-data) in the base system, but not "the 
> rest", though.

Well, I am not sure what is a basis for such a requirement.
As I pointed out before we already have /dev/pci and /dev/io and those 
are not going to go away, because there are quite reasonable 
applications that require those devices (and wide-spread too). And I 
think that sufficiently structured (via ioctl interface) access to CPU 
is also needed for some quite useful (and reasonable) userland applications.
I can understand efforts to prevent foot-shooting, but I can not 
understand an approach of limiting abilities of a (sufficiently) 
privileged user. After all, he/she can rebuild a kernel and put all they 
need into it.

-- 
Andriy Gapon