OFW sad face doesn't say why

[Mitch Bradley]

If you hold down the check key while booting, the firmware will give 
additional information about the boot progress, in both iconic and 
textual form.

I put in the sad face because I needed some way to indicate failure.  
The published design specified what is supposed to happen when 
everything works but didn't give detailed guidance for the myriad of 
possible failure scenarios.

Note that, in the normal (no check key) case, there is no SD icon - at 
NN's insistence.




Eben Eliason wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <mikus at bga.com 
> <mailto:mikus at bga.com>> wrote:
>
>     Happened to put in laptop BB a SD card copied over from laptop AA.
>     Pushed power-on, laptop BB showed me a sad face and powered down.
>
>     Figured out why -- that SD card had a directory on it called
>     /security, and in that directory there was a file called
>     develop.sig.  Since this file's content did not match BB's identity,
>     BB powered down.  I erased that file - then BB would boot o.k.
>
>
>     If you have a cheap SD card, and an enemy with an XO, why not create
>     /security/develop.sig on that SD card, and surreptitiously insert
>     that SD card into his OLPC - he would be extremely UNLIKELY to think
>     of examining the sd-card-slot for the cause of his XO not booting.
>
>     If the OFW identified its reason for not proceeding with booting,
>     this opportunity for mischief would not work.
>
>
> Hmm, A big lock icon is supposed to appear when no lease is found.  A 
> sad face was never part of the design; I wonder if that slipped in as 
> a temporary placeholder and never got fixed.  Mitch, do you know where 
> this lives (I assume firmware, but maybe not), and if it's possible to 
> clean up with little effort?
>
> It seems to me that we should only be doing positive checks, not 
> negative, against the security info in external devices.  It should 
> simply move on and illustrate that no valid key was found (adding the 
> lock icon next to the SD icon, for instance). It shouldn't be possible 
> to prevent an XO from booting at all if any of the devices (including 
> the XO itself) have a valid key, right?
>
> - Eben
>