Bitfrost and dual-boot

[Albert Cahalan]

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 2:08 PM, Morgan Collett
<morgan.collett at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 7:48 PM, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Jameson "Chema" Quinn writes:

>>> Actually, the goals are more limited. Say you have dual-boot;
>>> OS 1 has bitfrost, OS 2 does not. Things OS 2 should not do:
>>>
>>> 1. Read private files from OS 1.
>> ...
>>> 2. By writing to OS 1's file system,
>>
>> I do believe that, practically speaking, all of this is moot.
>> Windows uses both SD card storage and the NAND flash storage.
>>
>> (NAND storage being what you'd hoped to protect)
>>
>> The most you could protect would be the firmware itself, but
>> it is silly to imagine that a laptop would have OpenFirmware
>> when the NAND storage doesn't even have Linux.
>
> Windows does not need to use the NAND flash with the dual boot setup.
>
> From Monday's OLPC News mail on the community-news list
> (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-May/000128.html):
>
>> Mitch Bradley:
>> * Reports that dual boot  is working.  You can plug in an SD card to
>> boot Windows, then remove it to boot back to Linux.
>
> This of course using OFW2 which is not yet released.

This morning on IRC however, Mitch says "that other OS uses NAND".

It sure is odd how so many people continue to think
that Microsoft would not do everything in their power
to prevent dual-boot. Three decades of evidence is
against that silly fantasy. This is war to them, and they
take full advantage of every friendly gesture we make.
Above all, they want platform(*) control.

In this case however, malice is not even required.
The NAND would make a nice place for swapping.

* FYI, "platform": ABI, API, protocols, file formats...
(thus the opposition to portable runtime layers like
Sugar, Java, Sugar, Borland's OWL classes, Sugar,
POSIX, and Sugar)