Larry Osterman's WebLog

This video is super. Great work Larry.

Don't know if you get a notification of these questions by email or something, so I don't know if maybe this question will be forgotten forever.

But I wanted to ask whether you guys have done any formal analysis on the safety of exposing the DMA buffer to user mode. Is it guaranteeably safe to give garbage data to hardware?
DMA is after all one of the nastiest things in hardware there is. You're obviously not pointing to data that *controls* the transfers, but for example are we sure that soundcards etc can handle NaNs... and what not.
Honestly, I don't know what could go wrong, I haven't the faintest clue, but that's why I'm asking whether you guys have.

Happy holidays!