hardware synthesizers patch

John G Heim jheim at math.wisc.edu
Thu Mar 19 13:09:47 EDT 2015


You know, that is a very good question. How'd that notorious line #43 in 
serialio.c get into the kernel code?
I suspect though, that members of the speakup development team put it in 
there at the request of the kernel  quality control people. The speakup 
developers were probably told the code couldn't even get into staging 
without it.

The whole thing makes no sense though. If you happen to have the right 
hardware synth, it will still work because some of the drivers  don't 
use the code in serialio.c and instead talk directly to the serial ports 
anyway. Besides, you're not going to load speakup unless you are blind 
and even a flawed screen reader is better than nothing.





On 03/19/2015 11:39 AM, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> Did the patch that disabled hardware speech synthesizers get into the
> kernel at the upstream level put in by Linus Torvalds or someone working
> for him, or was the origin of the patch one of the downstream distributors
> with subsequent adoption by the upstream kernel workers?  Another question
> I should ask is beyond disabling hardware speech synthesizers what was the
> purpose of that patch?  I hope that served to block at least one security
> hole.
>
>
>
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-- 
John Heim, jheim at math.wisc.edu, skype:john.g.heim


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