Re: Securing data in memory (was "Locking physical memory (fwd)

Forwarded message:

> From: Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>
> Subject: Re: Securing data in memory (was "Locking physical memory (fwd)
> Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 11:44:04 -0600 (CST)

> > Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 17:41:53 +0100
> > From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
> > Subject: Re: Securing data in memory (was "Locking physical memory (fwd)
> 
> > What is Choate thinking when he says the ENTIRE OS is run under this?
> 
> My mistake. Since it really does only handle individual apps it's of limited
> utility in the Windows world because of the numerous ways to get system
> level access.

I forgot to add that I'd still be interested in knowing if the utility would
support the entire OS being run under this and what the memory constraints
would be.

If I had 2 of the Samsung 4G memory modules w/ battery back-up I could run
an entire machine without a hard-drive.


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>Jim Choate wrote: 
>> If I had 2 of the Samsung 4G memory modules w/ battery back-up 
>> I could run an entire machine without a hard-drive.

Yeah - it can be quite nice to do that, both for security and speed.
Hugh Daniel's done some work on making Unix run on systems with 
read-only root drives - there are some SCSI drives which support
read-only mode again, and there are PCMCIA flash cards which have
write-protect switches and look like disks to the OS, 
so you can set them up the way you want and then go to read-only.

Not as many choices if you're running Microsoftware instead
of an operating system, though PCs give you some way to 
fake things out.  

At 11:26 PM 11/28/98 +0000, Frank O'Dwyer wrote:
>If you had no hard drive why the hell would you worry about disk
>swapping?

You need to jumpstart the machine somehow, and unless you 
burn the OS into PROMs, the easiest way is disk drives.
On the other hand, if Win9X wants to swap something to disk,
and there's no disk there, it could get pretty grouchy.

A long time ago, when disks and memory were both more expensive,
one of the memory companies (Kingston?  EMC?) made some SCSI boxes
with lots of memory in them, so the operating system doesn't
need to know that it's silicon and not rotating metal.
They also had UPS battery backup in them.
FSCK sure goes faster when you don't need to wait for mechanicals.
Some PCMCIA memory cards today just look like more RAM;
others can look like disks.


				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639

Jim Choate wrote: 
> If I had 2 of the Samsung 4G memory modules w/ battery back-up I could run
> an entire machine without a hard-drive.

If you had no hard drive why the hell would you worry about disk
swapping?

Cheers,
Frank O'Dwyer.

At 09:22 PM 11/29/98 -0500, Bill Stewart wrote:
>Yeah - it can be quite nice to do that, both for security and speed.
>Hugh Daniel's done some work on making Unix run on systems with 
>read-only root drives - there are some SCSI drives which support
>read-only mode again, and there are PCMCIA flash cards which have
>write-protect switches and look like disks to the OS, 
>so you can set them up the way you want and then go to read-only.

Unix has been ported to memory only systems including the Palm OS (using
virtual drives) but you can't do much with it at this point.

http://ryeham.ee.ryerson.ca/uClinux/

"The Linux/Microcontroller project is a port of the Linux 2.0 to systems
without a Memory Management Unit. At present, only Motorola MC68000
derivatives are supported. The first target system to sucessfully boot is
the 3Com PalmPilot with a TRG SuperPilot Board and a custom boot loader
they put together specifically for the Linux/PalmPilot port. Thanks guys!"

DCF