[sldev] How Far For Security?

[Strife Onizuka]

We are getting off topic. You wouldn't want to read straight from disk
to memory or GPU. You wouldn't be able to take advantage of the file
system, you would have to read the data by sector. I don't really care
enough about this off-topic to continue it.

On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 8:14 AM, Argent Stonecutter
<secret.argent at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2008-06-22, at 01:32, Strife Onizuka wrote:
>>
>> You couldn't go straight from disk to GPU. There is no interface that
>> connects the GPU to the disk. What you would do is write your program
>> to make the appropriate requests to read a file into memory. The disk
>> drive would be told where to read, and to use DMA to write the data
>> directly to an already allocated memory range (the North Bridge would
>> route the incoming data straight to memory).
>
> I'm not asking "does the hardware exist", I'm asking "does the OS API
> exist"? You have to make zero-copy transfers to memory at specific
> *physical* addresses, bypassing the ubiquitous buffer cache which *is*
> handled by the CPU.
>
> This kind of thing normally requires at the least privileged access, and
> probably kernel access, on any OS that makes even the slightest effort of
> implementing multiuser protection. Does Windows really allow non-privileged
> processes to grovel around in memory maps?
>
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