Re: security: delete BIOS password in keyboard buffer during kernelbootup

From: Alan Cox
Date: Tue Nov 11 2008 - 11:54:25 EST


> OTOH we don't call BIOS from linux, so we assume that low 64K is
> usable memory (unless marked otherwise in memmap, I guess).

We use the BIOS in some cases for PCI routing, PCI services, APM, and
indirectly for SMM traps, ACPI and via user space for other stuff. So we
preserve the bottom 4K for the BIOS 0x40:xx page
>
> Anyway, proper place to do clearing is bootloader; it interacts with
> bios already, anyway...

Agreed entirely.
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