Re: [Etherboot-developers] Checksum Failed

[<ebi...@ln...>]

"Timothy Legge" <tl...@ro...> writes:

> Hi
> 
> I was cleaning up the sundance driver a little.  When I compiled the
> driver, I received a checksum error and I get a Boot Err when booting
> the client.
> 
> What is the check sum error?

The latest version of mkelf computes a simple ip checksum over
the entire loaded image.  The etherboot elf loader checks that
checksum (only if it is present in the ELF note section) and if it
does not match you see an error loading the image.

In this case it sounds like it may have been triggered by a sundance
bug.

The original motivation was that occasionally with bad hardware I see
a corrupted data transfer.  A checksum on the image allows me to
see if it was loaded across the network correctly.  

Additionally there has been some research in how to implement trusted
computing.  Which I believe means verifying an image signature when
the image is downloaded.  And with an infrastructure to check an image
checksum it is clear where to put the hooks to verify an image
signature.

Eric