[mythtv-users] Is NVIDIA worth the bother?

[Eric Sharkey]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 6:48 PM, Bill Williamson <bill at bbqninja.com> wrote:
>> The question is, is there any possible way for the closed code to
>> cause a kernel panic or security breach, assuming that the open code
>> is properly written?  If the answer is yes, this makes a lot of people
>> nervous.
>>
>
> A video card driver writes directly to the memory and registers of the
> video card.  There is no way anything with that sort of access is not
> exploitable in some way no matter the interface it's given.

The idea is to isolate the "code that writes directly to the memory
and registers of the video card" from the "code that figures out what
to write".  Presumably the former code can be open source and the
latter code closed.  If there's a secure message passing interface
between the two, this can be done safely, although there may be some
performance hit with this kind of architecture.

Eric