Checksummed environments

[Kristian Amlie]

Hey, I work for Northern.tech, developing update software for embedded
Linux devices.

I have a question about GRUB's environment block: This block is not
checksummed, and hence I reckon it can become corrupt if power is lost
in the middle of a write.

This is an important safety criterion for us, so we've been thinking of
developing environment block checksumming as an extension to the
existing save_env and load_env commands. The most likely approach will
be to grab X amount of bytes at the end of the block and use these for
the checksum.

This would also allow us to fall back to an earlier environment file if
the current one is corrupt, hence implementing redundancy.

Is this something that the GRUB project would be interested in? We want
to upstream this if possible, since we think many people may benefit
from this.

-- 
Kristian