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As far as backwards compatbility goes, I was arguing against changing the way freeze lock works as Thomas Jensen had suggested: "Some thing like the BIOS must issue a command before the first read command for the drive not to be frozen perhaps". You'll break a lot of platforms (embedded or non-embedded). SFL is neither recommended or not recommended by T13. (It's not the job of a standards body to recommend the use or non-use of an optional feature in the standards). Ultimately this is a customer (end-user and OEM / MB) decision. I question the 66% number, but that's mainly because I don't know how they generated their sample set to know if it is statistically valid or not. Speaking purely on my interactions with my customers, SFL is a requirement for many of them (and has been for some time), but ultimately they get to make the decision. It's not up to T13 (since we don't do compliance testing), me (as a chipset / HBA vendor), or the drive manufacturers to enforce an optional feature to a customer who is building a system. -----Original Message----- From: Jeff Garzik [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 12:35 PM To: Mark Overby Cc: Thomas Jansen; [email protected] Subject: Re: [t13] Security problems Mark Overby wrote: > That's an implementation decision. If I'm building for an embedded > environment or whatever, why do I HAVE to set SECURITY FREEZE LOCK. The > answer - I don't. In order to maintain backwards compatibility, you > can't force someone to issue the command first in order to have the > drive work. That would prevent me from buying a new drive for an older > system. T13 and ATA strongly, strongly maintains backwards compatibility > as a design feature. If "add SFL to your ATA implementation" is the standing recommendation of T13, for high-volume Wintel platforms, then it is not backwards compatible. We're not talking about embedded platforms here; we're talking about 66% (according to Heise) of the popular Wintel platforms not setting SECURITY FREEZE LOCK. Jeff
