About IBM's new USBKey

[Bill Stewart]

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 at pobox.com
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