The following reply was made to PR kern/35821; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Martin Husemann <martin@duskware.de>
To: Elad Efrat <elad@bsd.org.il>
Cc: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org, yamt@NetBSD.org
Subject: Re: kern/35821: /dev/mem is not readable any more
Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 18:18:51 +0100

 On Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 06:28:06PM +0200, Elad Efrat wrote:
 > the problem is that the unmanaged memory access policy was different on
 > several architectures. since nobody voiced in when the discussions took
 > place, the decision was to go by the i386 policy on all archs and
 > restrict access to unmanaged memory to securelevel <= 0. (this is
 > documented in secmodel_bsd44(9) btw, under securelevel implications)
 
 Yes, I remember that discussion and was not aware that this would
 affect things like bios dumping.
 
 I do not want to restart the whole discussion, but for the concrete case
 at hand:
 
 >   - default-defer in the unified kauth machdep listener at least for
 >     KAUTH_MACHDEP_UNMANAGEDMEM
 >   - write per-architecture exclusions, like the one you note above
 
 The former is just a cleaner method to implement the latter?
 
 If this all is considered the "right" and intended behaviour,
 I'm also fine with adding proper error handling to acpidump (which should
 be done anyway), and improving the relevant documentation ({p}read(2), maybe
 secmodel_bsd44(9)).
 
 Martin