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Back when Intel introduced the 80286, they didn't quite document everything right away. Errata were needed. Then the 80386 changed things. And then someone convinced them to add just one more feature at the last minute, which didn't get documented properly again.
The History of a Security Hole takes a look at the problems introduced by the I/O Permission Bitmap (IOPB) in the 80286, and how fallout from the implementation caused a security hole in all versions of OpenBSD up to 6.3 and NetBSD up to 4.4.
Conclusion? This programming thing is hard.
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There will be big changes for you but you will be happy.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 07 2018, @03:57PM
The reason I had asked about a kernel patch was because I didn't know whether /dev/null was part of the kernel in the sense of /proc or /sys. But actually I did know this from reading about 15-18 years ago. It just didn't strike me until you mentioned it. Then I was like: oh, yeah, right! Not something I would have thought of on my own.
Thanks for the great (snicker) approach to scaling if you are doing too much IO to /dev/null. :-)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.