[Nouveau] kernel memory access tracer

[Dave Airlie]

On 01/03/2009, at 7:51, Pekka Paalanen <pq at iki.fi> wrote:

> Hi
>
> On Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:39:06 +0100
> Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I actually wanted to ask some questions about Nouveau and the NVIDIA
>> drivers. I was wondering if there would be any point in extending
>> kmemcheck to track this driver's use of kernel memory. We could quite
>> easily make a "memory access tracer", which would show all the memory
>> access patterns of the driver's allocated memory. Not just addresses,
>> but also offsets into the objects (if it was allocated with slab),
>> member sizes, and also the actual bytes written. This is for
>> reverse-engineering the binary blob, obviously.
>
> I don't think that would gain any more information about the hardware.
> If we were to RE the proprietary driver, then yes, it would be useful,
> but we're not. We're interested only in the hardware.
>
> There's also the issue, that this might be considered RE'ing the
> proprietary software, and that might have legal consequences in
> some countries.
>
> A nice idea, but IMHO not applicable.
>

I think it might be useful for tracking nvidia's access to bios  
scripts as it keeps a ram copy of bios.

Dave

> Thanks.
>
> -- 
> Pekka Paalanen
> http://www.iki.fi/pq/
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