AMD64: Something's missing?

[SONE Takeshi]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 10:26:01PM +0200, Evan Langlois wrote:
> 
> > EtherBoot can boot lots of things from the network or an IDE hard disk.
> > FILO can boot from IDE hard disk, IDE CDROM, floppy, and maybe more? 9load
> > I don't know much about except that it is used to load the plan9 kernel.
> 
> I don't know much about FILO.  Can anyone comment on its compatibility with 
> the LILO graphical features (displaying graphical menus/splash screens), and 
> is there any support available for encrypted filesystems?

FILO is not aimed at being compatible with LILO.

> Assuming FILO works like LILO, and doesn't know about filesystems, I'm 
> assuming encryption would be difficult, and it might therefore be best to 
> chain-load another boot-loader, but I'd want the encryption keys to be in the 
> ROM to make it as difficult as possible to get to them.

FILO has filesystem routines borrowed from GRUB, so it works like GRUB
rather than LILO.

> Encryption in the BIOS itself may be a positive feature, not just for 
> corporate users that want to protect their IP, but laptop users and such (in 
> which case the key would be asked for on boot) that don't want sensitive 
> information leaking out just because a laptop was stolen.

Encryption in boot process doesn't make sense to me.
What you want to protect is the data in the storage, not the boot image
(kernel).
Encryption of the storage is OS's bussiness, and the OS will ask you the
password before decrypting any data.
-- 
Takeshi