Re: security: delete BIOS password in keyboard buffer duringkernel bootup

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Tue Nov 11 2008 - 11:18:54 EST


On Sun 2008-11-09 11:08:14, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Nov 2008 09:41:20 +0100
> Mathias Schnarrenberger <mathias.schnarrenberger@xxxxxx> 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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