Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:18:09 +0100
From: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: mathias.schnarrenberger@gmx.de, Olaf van der Spek <olafvdspek@gmail.com>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: security: delete BIOS password in keyboard buffer during
	kernel bootup
Message-ID: <20081111161808.GA4473@ucw.cz>
References: <200811081100.03966.mathias.schnarrenberger@gmx.de> <b2cc26e40811080839i387e5e94o519a5d1ff0086379@mail.gmail.com> <200811090941.20401.mathias.schnarrenberger@gmx.de> <20081109110814.13a4c099@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
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On Sun 2008-11-09 11:08:14, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Nov 2008 09:41:20 +0100
> Mathias Schnarrenberger <mathias.schnarrenberger@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> > > What if my BIOS stores some critical info at that memory address?
> > > I don't think the kernel is the right place to work around this issue.
> > 
> > AFAIK every IBM PC compatible BIOS stores the keyboard buffer in this area.
> 
> Not every system we boot the x86 kernel on is a PC compatible.

OTOH we don't call BIOS from linux, so we assume that low 64K is
usable memory (unless marked otherwise in memmap, I guess).

Anyway, proper place to do clearing is bootloader; it interacts with
bios already, anyway...

-- 
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(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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