* Brian Gerst <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> Disabling even less-used code that could have system stability impact.
> >> We've
> >> discouraged user-mode drivers for a very long time. Ironically, other
> >> than
> >> being configured through the vm86 syscall, there isn't really anything
> >> vm86-specific about it. All it does is register an IRQ handler that sends
> >> a
> >> signal to the task.
> >
> > So is this actually used by anything? Could we get away with disabling it,
> > just to see whether anything cares?
>
> My best guess would be some very old X11 drivers that needed interrupts to
> run
> the Video BIOS code.
So let's keep it - but not complicate it with another layer of disabling logic.
People that rely on legacies will enable vm86 as a single block - they won't
necessarily know how deeply they rely on it.
What _would_ be useful is to have a 3-mode vm86 sysctl:
1: enabled
0: disabled
-1: disabled permanently (one-shot disabling after bootup)
That way a distro can permanently disable vm86 for a particular bootup by
setting
it to -1 in /etc/sysctl.conf.
The kernel should default that setting to '0'.
Thanks,
Ingo
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