Re: Checksummed environments

[Daniel Kiper]

On Fri, Apr 06, 2018 at 11:25:22AM +0200, Kristian Amlie wrote:
> 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

I am not sure what exactly you mean by "GRUB's environment block".
Could you send me some references to the code?

> checksummed, and hence I reckon it can become corrupt if power is lost
> in the middle of a write.

What about the other blocks?

> 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.

Could you tell us more about that?

> 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.

Great! However, first of all we need some more info about that.

Daniel