SUID executable policy?

[Adam Jackson]

On Mon, 2007-04-09 at 23:33 -0500, Michael E Brown wrote:
> What is the policy/guidelines around having Set UID executables in
> Fedora?
> 
> I maintain libsmbios. Libsmbios has to read the system DMI/SMBIOS table
> to do its job, and this table can currently only be obtained by
> mmap()-ing /dev/mem.  I also need to read certain areas of RAM to get
> teh Dell system id, which is not in the DMI tables. I would like to make
> some of this available to non-root users, but the only way I can think
> of do do this involves SUID executables.
> 
> Can anybody suggest a better way?

Exposing the SMBIOS table as a device would be a start.  There's
precedent for drivers that do little else besides map a specific region
of memory, since /dev/mem is just way too coarse-grained.

- ajax