Andrew Brown writes:

> >But why not?  The difficulty I've had lies in trying to be precise
> >about exactly why it's not reasonable to expect the kernel to survive
> >dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mem but it is reasonable to expect it to
> >survive, say, experiments with routing sockets.
> 
> i guess i just can't conceive of a use for writing /dev/zero over
> /dev/mem, whereas toying with routing sockets to see how they work and
> how to use them makes sense...

With "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mem" you are effectively asking the
system to die, and so it isn't a malfunction for it to do so :)

With routing socket messages you are asking for routing operations to
be completed, which is very different to asking the system to crash -
and it's surprising if it leads to one...

Cheers,

Dave