Re: /dev/openprom problems - Solaris 1 or Solaris 2

[newsham () aloha net (Tim Newsham)]

> 5) It makes vastly more sense for sun (or or any other OS development
> team) to spend time on new features, instead of fixing "problems" where
> priviledged users "can" crash their own machines (/oh boy!  I get to
> crash a machine I'm responsible for!/).  Consider:
>
>         dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s1.
>
> This is a generally bad thing to do, but I sure don't want _any_ vendor to
> waste time disallowing dd'ing to certain partitions.  (If someone tries out
> that dd command, I'm not responsible for the results.)

oh this is just silly.  part of "spend(ing) time on new features" is
debugging them.  If your system has a bug (crashing sun by
reading the openrom is a bug,  in case you werent sure) then
it should be fixed.  Really, how much effort do you
estimate will be taken by fixing this simple bug?  The
coding itself will be trivial, the only factor is the
additional testing and distribution of patches.

dd'ing to a device is not a bug, though its probably a good
idea to disallow writing to a mounted partition (as is
done in some systems).

                                    Tim N.