Les Mikesell wrote:
On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 16:03, Mike McCarty wrote:
>MSDOS does *not* use interrupt driven I/O on those ports. It uses
>BIOS calls, specifically INT 14h. For example, from Ralph Brown's
>interrupt list
I don't see how trusting bios equates to secure code.
It doesn't. And I didn't say so. Any system with external
connections only enjoys relative security. I don't "trust"
BIOS. But the BIOS code is there regardless of whether
Linux or MSDOS or whatever OS (or even no OS) sits on top
of it.
>Precisely. And unless an application invokes MSDOS, it will never
>do anything to the serial port, nor will the BIOS.
You can say the same for the keyboard - and the input devices
are more or less interchangeable. The application might be
COPY.
I don't follow the point.
>If there is more code, there is more exposure. MSDOS has much
less
>code than Linux and the Linux drivers for the serial ports.
I think you need to take quality of code into account in a
statement like that.
Certainly. But no matter how carefully crafted, more code
equates to more exposure.
Mike
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