>From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
>Date: 07 May 1999 12:09:40 -0400
>
>What's the point of the apeture driver, anyway? Once it is in place,
>all security is gone. Might as well just compile with options INSECURE.

I don't understand this claim.  The aperture driver restricts mmap()
of the frame buffer to the range between 0xA0000 and 0xBFFFF.  It also
sets a limit of one open() on the frame buffer device.  It doesn't
seem to me that "all security is gone" when access is allowed to this
restricted range of addresses.  It allows use of other security
features of higher securelevels, such as immutable and append-only
flags, and write protection of mounted filesystems, while still
allowing the system to run X.

Maybe the aperture driver could be made obsolete, by replacing
``options INSECURE'' with a number of different options allowing more
specific control over precisely what is and isn't protected at various
securelevels.  But we don't have that kind of fine-grained control right
now, so I don't think it's useless at the moment.

I'm sure you had good reason for making this claim.  What am I missing?

Cheers,
entropy

--
entropy -- it's not just a good idea, it's the second law.
"Microsoft is _really_ unreliable but Linux is _worse_."  -Ken Thompson