Be it for any reason, it is a security loop whole. Even more dangerous is you have access to device file and its not very hard to erase blocks from disk through device file eg.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=32k count=32k it can erase 1G disk space. As far as I know, Windows OS don't allow you to write to the disk directly from user space. Thanks Rajat On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Alexandre Courbot <[email protected]>wrote: > > Although, it is *okay* to use /dev/kmem for reading, it is a > > particularly bad idea to use it to write data into the kernel. That is > > because, if you want to change the value of a particular field in a > > kernel data structure for ex., you would find the offset of the object > > based on the kernel image & sometimes if you were not sure as to > > which particular kernel you booted, your offset will be wrong & you > > would trash a certain kernel data structure possibly bringing down the > > whole system. > > Not to mention the locking problem. Many data structures in the kernel > requires a lock to be acquired before being accessed, so this adds to > the challenge of finding the right address of the desired object. > > So in short: never do that! > > Alex. > > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with > "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to [email protected] > Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ > >
