From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jonathan Tripathy Subject: Re: RAM security Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:53:33 +0000 Message-ID: <4CFD150D.6070505@abpni.co.uk> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com To: Keir Fraser , Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org On 06/12/10 16:52, Keir Fraser wrote: > On 06/12/2010 08:31, "Jonathan Tripathy" wrote: > >>>> 3) If the physical server was shutdown (e.g. plug pulled), I'm guessing >>>> this will presetn a problem? >>> Xen scrubs all memory during boot, unless told not to via a boot parameter. >>> >> Now this bit of code makes me happy! >> >> Just wondering, if Xen scrubs all memory during boot, why is booting the >> Hypervisor so fast? My machine has 8GB of RAM and starts nice and snappy.. > It probably takes just a couple of seconds to scrub 8GB. Xen does the > scrubbing immediately before starting dom0, and you should see it say > 'Scrubbing RAM...' and extra dots continur to appear until scrubbing is > complete. > > -- Keir > I guess in my head I'm comparing RAM scrubbing to dd if=/dev/zero, which takes longer as it's usually to disk