Re: unusual startup messages

Gerald Britton (gbritton@whitman.gmu.edu)
Wed, 30 Oct 1996 23:30:13 -0500 (EST)


> ->I have been getting this unusual problem since late 1.3.x .. it started
> ->when i decided to put my floppy driver into a module .. it does not cause
> ->any problems, but it is a slight annoyance.
> ->
> ->ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
> ->ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
> ->Partition check:
> -> hda:Started kswapd v 1.4.2.2
> -> hda1 hda2 hda3
> ->VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.

It seemed that people missed my point in this startup messages, why does
"Started kswapd v 1.4.2.2" appear WITHIN the partition check? it used to
appear above it, but when i modularized my floppy driver, the two
intermixed.

> ->one more question, is steganography and DES/IDEA crypt going to be
> ->incorporated into the kernel in 2.1.x, or are there problems with having
> ->cryptography in the kernel?
>
> I don't think Linus is in favour this this. As IMHO this can be entirely
> done in user space, and we don't need an big, bloated kernel. But even we
> do it, what would be use of it? There is already suppport for encrypted
> volumes, the secure rcp/telnet/ etc are alredy done by ssh stuff, and we
> are not going to crypt memory ;)

i agree that having the crypto operations in user space would be a good
idea, i have played with IDEA encryption patches, and there is a noticable
slowdown when the cryptography is occuring. but, shouldn't hooks be
present perhaps for encryption to be handled by a process, feeding the
loop device? perhaps and idea similar to the userfs idea, but for
devices, a process which could be setup to control the I/O for a device
such a process could feed a steganographed filesystem or an encrypted
filesystem to a device, which could then be mounted .. i had this idea
several months ago, but i did not have the free time to code it,
unfortunately i still dont have much free time :(

--
Gerald Britton <gbritton@whitman.gmu.edu>
Walt Whitman Internet System Administrator