On Sat, 03 Feb 2001 "Sjoerd Op 't Land" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I wanted to ask this very same question just when I read yours. I'm
> developing driver software for DMX (a system for controlling spotlights,
> lasers, stroboscopes etc.), and a PCI card is used here.
>
> For this purpose, I have to write to and read from the card, i.e. reading
> from and writing to some memory addresses.
>
> This can be done with a DOS shell, but as you may understand, timing is a
> very important thing at performances, and you can't manage that with a
> shell, which is extremely slow.
These cards almost always come with a C library that provide a
high-level API to access their features. And while you can't use
these libraries directly from MetaCard, the amount of "glue" code that
you'd have to put into an external would be minimal (mostly just
argument type conversion), as would the amount of C that you'd have to
learn to use them. You would have to have a C compiler, though.
Regards,
Scott
PS: Robin-David Hammond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> the concept of running MC setuid root, and giving it direct access
> to ram scares the hell out of me, a buffer overrun could have severe
> consequences.
I'm not sure I see the problem here. Seems to me you're a lot less
likely to run into this kind of problem with MetaTalk than any other
language, even if it did support direct peek/poke into memory.
Certainly the MetaCard engine has a lot fewer of these kinds of
problems than any other application that you might want to run setuid
that I know of (and that includes, unfortunately, such Internet
infrastructure standards as bind and sendmail, in which the incidence
of stupid security holes like buffer overflows continues to be so
frequent that it rises to the level of criminal negligence IMHO).
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Please send bug reports to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, not this list.
