Who needs /dev/kmem?

Posted Aug 18, 2005 5:23 UTC (Thu) by mingo (guest, #31122)
In reply to: Who needs /dev/kmem? by pengo
Parent article: Who needs /dev/kmem?

i think this says it all:

"It has been suggested that root kits are the largest user community for this kind of access, but there are no forward compatibility guarantees for root kit authors."

what would you use /dev/kmem for? If you are interested in runtime kernel internals then you probably want to apply the kgdb patch (or any other kernel debugger), that gives you vastly more options than /dev/kmem.

/dev/kmem has no real use today, other than rootkits - hence the removal from Fedora. It should be removed from mainline too.