[cap-talk] "Security Issues related to Pentium System Management Mode"

[John Carlson]

>
I'm showing my age.  I didn't even know those were system calls.
My training was under BSD (pre free, net and open), then SunOS.
By that time I had moved out of C and into GUIs and string processing.
I'd like to know the X11 internals, but I'd rather spend my time writing
applications.

John

>  I'm not completely sure on this, but I seem to recall that X.org and
>  XFree86 drivers the code must run as root to gain access to the  
> ioperm()
>  and iopl() system calls.
>
>  If the were confined to using framebuffer interfaces (using mmap on
>  device nodes under /dev/) then these X servers could/can run as  
> non-root
>  (given appropriate permissions on the appropriate /dev/* nodes).
>
>  I suspect that XDarwin only supports framebuffer interfaces.
>
> -- 
> Jim Dennis
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