At 08:45 PM 2/5/01 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
It seems to me that with 8M you could keep your kernel, your encryption keys, your encryption engine, along with filesystem hashes on it. If they could get this up to 16M+ you could probably put a bootable image on it, make the system come up much quicker.
Capacity isn't much of a problem - the Linux Router Project folks can boot off a 1.44 or 1.72MB floppy, so even 8 MB should feel roomy (not:-) Flash memory is pretty cheap these days - I think 8MB is about $10, so the choice of 8 vs. 16MB is just price vs. market demand. Are there any BIOSes that let you boot the computer from USB? I suppose it would be a logical thing to do, since USB is a reasonable speed for supporting floppy drives or CDROMs, but I haven't seen it on BIOS menus before. For laptops, there are PCMCIA flash cards that emulate IDE drives, and also have write-protect switches, which lets you boot safely as well as quickly. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639