On 4/14/2014 9:38 AM, Matthew Black wrote:
Shouldn't a decent OS scrub RAM and disk sectors before allocating them to processes, unless that process enters processor privileged mode and sets a call flag? I recall digging through disk sectors on RSTS/E to look for passwords and other interesting stuff over 30 years ago.
I have been out of the loop for quite a while but my strongly held belief is that such scrubbing would be an enormous (and intolerable) overhead in any but a classified system running up around "secret" or higher. (I know of a system in Silicon Valley where they would bring us core dumps to print because their system was down so hard. The dump program would take about a third of a box of fanfold and stack it, still blank, as I recall, in the stacker. Seems like the law of the land was "If you did not set the value, you can make no assumptions about it." -- Requiescas in pace o email Two identifying characteristics of System Administrators: Ex turpi causa non oritur actio Infallibility, and the ability to learn from their mistakes. (Adapted from Stephen Pinker)