From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 12:12:17 +0800
To: Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer <cypherpunks@EINSTEIN.ssz.com>
Subject: Re: Securing data in memory (was "Locking physical memory (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <199811281827.MAA04760@einstein.ssz.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19981129212227.008e9440@idiom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>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
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