Nobody has ever claimed you could write drivers without damaging hardware. When I was writing my own toy kernel there were many warnings such as: "Probing mem

Nobody has ever claimed you could write drivers without damaging hardware. When I was writing my own toy kernel there were many warnings such as: "Probing memory-mapped PCI devices may have unpredictable results and may theoretically damage your system, so once again we discourage its use." 1 [1] http://wiki.osdev.org/Detecting_Memory_(x86) http://wiki.osdev.org/Detecting_Memory_(x86)