pmi tries to access '/dev/mem' when run as not root.

[Paul Sladen]

pmi is used as the interface between programs that want the machine to be put to sleep and the complicated automagic that allows this to happen.

When pmi is queried by a non-root user, it succeeds but also shows severeal attempts at accessing '/dev/mem':

  $ pmi capabilities
  /dev/mem: Permission denied
  /dev/mem: Permission denied
  /dev/mem: Permission denied
  hibernate suspend

The permissions should be checked at the access avoided, especially if it is not actually required.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

  /usr/sbin/pmi

unconditionally pulls in:

  /usr/share/acpi-support/device-funcs

which does:

      manufacturer=`dmidecode --string system-manufacturer|sed -e 's/ *$//'`
    model=`dmidecode --string system-product-name|sed -e 's/ *$//'`
    version=`dmidecode --string system-version|sed -e 's/ *$//'`

so it means that most of the time 'pmi capabilities' or 'pmi query' is actually lying as the contents of:

  /etc/default/acpi-support

are used instead of the machine-specific overrides in:

  /usr/share/acpi-support/$manufacturer.config

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

As the dmi contents stay pretty static, one option would be to cache the result of 'dmidecode -s *' on boot.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

 acpi-support (0.66) dapper; urgency=low
 .
   * Cache result of 'dmidecode -s *' so that they can be access without
     privileges when checking 'pmi capabilities'. [Malone: #36573]