I have never dug into low level things like cpu architectures etc. and decided to give it a try when I learned about cpu.land.

I already was aware of the existence of user and kernel mode but while I was reading site it came to me that “I still can harm my system with userland programs so what does it mean to switch user mode for almost everything other than kernel and drivers?” also we still can do many things with syscalls, what is that stopping us(assuming we want to harm system of course) from damaging our system.

[edit1]: grammar mistakes

  • taaz@biglemmowski.win
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    If I had to guess (and simplify too) I would say that that would be the difference between your freshly compiled C program just dying with sigsegv then getting (mostly) peacefully cleaned up, or otherwise your system either flat out dying on you or even worse, something somewhere getting corrupted and the system spirals out of control possibly thrashing data and even hardware.

    https://stackoverflow.com/a/1311432