Remote memory access through FireWire?

Remote memory access through FireWire?

[Omen Wild]

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I just ran accross this kerneltrap article:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/145/334

Quoting from the page:
"As you know, IEEE1394 is a bus and OHCI supports physical access to
the host memory. This means that you can access the remote host over
firewire without software support at the remote host. In other words,
you can investigate remote host's physical memory whether its OS is
alive or crashed or hangs up."

The article is talking about FreeBSD, but I was wondering if Linux has
a similar issue.  Can someone plugged into the FireWire bus
snoop/modify the entire contents of Linux's memory?

Thanks,
   Omen

-- 
The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity.

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Re: Remote memory access through FireWire?

[Valdis.Kletnieks]

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On Fri, 31 Oct 2003 17:36:28 EST, Omen Wild <Omen.Wild@Dartmouth.EDU>  said:

> "As you know, IEEE1394 is a bus and OHCI supports physical access to
> the host memory. 

Supporting something as part of the hardware/protocol design is one thing.

Writing the device driver to support it is another (I'm sure that *before* you crash,
you have to set bits in the appropriate OHCI structures).

Actually allowing it to be enabled is a third thing.

Having said that, it *would* make for an interesting kgdb enhancement. :)

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