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You don't get interrupt handlers, for one thing (though I think there are projects that do allow complete userspace drivers), and as binarycrusader mentioned, it's incredibly dangerous to give any process full access to the entire physical memory space. A single vulnerability in that process gives the attacker the ability to write to all of system memory. This can be mitigated somewhat by mmap()ing only the smallest possible region of interest, then dropping root privileges.


Yep, although most linux dists now have "/dev/mem protection" meaning that on stock distro kernels (Ubuntu, CentOS, etc), access to actual "physical memory" is disabled.

Ref: http://lwn.net/Articles/267427/

OK for driver development. If you need access to physical memory you have to compile a kernel with unrestricted /dev/mem.


> You don't get interrupt handlers, for one thing

Thanks.




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