Re: [RFT] Reed-Solomon

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 05:10:23PM -0400, Phillip Susi wrote:
> On 9/27/2010 12:12 PM, Colin Watson wrote:
> >> So you are adding bit error detection and correction to the boot loader?
> >>  You realize that the hard disk already does reed-solomon right?  So a
> >> second layer of it doesn't seem to have much point.
> > 
> > You're missing context.
> 
> Apparently.  Fill me in?

FlexNet and similar like to write to track 0 sectors (outside partitioned
space) to store license info.  This clobbers part of grub potentially.
So to make grub more tolerant of such misbehaviour, the idea suggested
was to add error correction to grub so it can survive attacks on its code
(and even potential disk errors).

-- 
Len Sorensen