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Bug#336220: xdm: bogus /dev/mem access lead to trouble on arm platforms



Package: xdm
Severity: important

On arm platforms where physical RAM doesn't start at physical address
zero, opening /dev/mem and reading from it causes a kernel oops.  This
is arguably a kernel bug, but it's still not a very good idea to just
start randomly poking around in /dev/mem in search of entropy, which is
what xdm does if it can't get entropy elsewhere.

(When the kernel is fixed, blindly reading from /dev/mem will simply
just fail with EFAULT instead of oopsing.  If that will cause xdm to
fail, it should really just fail right away if /dev/random doesn't work.)


-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: armeb (armv4b)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.13
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)



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