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While the floppy disc and optical drive may have been retired to the domain retro computing, ISOs are still the standard delivery mechanism for most hypervisor OS installations. If you don't provided a convenient means to test your tiny OS, I'm not going to jump through hoops that could've been automated and solved at the scale of 1 release process vs. N users.
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Immutability is not a property of the ISO file (system) format, it's a property of having it live on an optical disc. But most computers these days don't have drives for optical discs, and if your ISO is merely a file on a USB stick, then it can be broken just as easily.
This is not true, ISO9660 was designed to be a read-only filesystem: it has no concept of slack space nor sectors in the traditional sense. Every file and directory entry on ISO9660 consists of a single extent (contiguous number of sectors). If your file or directory entry needs to grow beyond its current size, you must create a new copy of the entire entry and append it to the image. The only writable filesystems th…
And if someone really wanted to (in a black hat scenario), it would absolutely be possible to rewrite an ISO image on the fly to modify individual files.
Kernel image files already use bzimage for a long time.
That would make it boot much faster, and use less memory than ISO:
https://blog.sigma-star.at/post/2022/07/squashfs-erofs/
First step of system installation on Ubuntu (Debian) is uncompressing the filesystem. Why not use compressed FS for this purpose too, and shorten the whole process to few seconds?
I often feel we missed a chance to make booting from removable media real easy. If we had built ISO support into EFI, you could just copy an ISO (like a container) to a MBR or GPT partitioned thumb drive and boot it - no magic tools required, no bits to set. Yes FAT32 has a 4gb limitation, but there is nothing saying that couldn't be fixed with future versions of EFI, or by using multiple partitions on thumb drive. E…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not true, ISO9660 was designed to be a read-only filesystem: it has no concept of slack space nor sectors in the traditional sense. Every file and directory entry on ISO9660 consists of a single extent (contiguous number of sectors). If your file or directory entry needs to grow beyond its current size, you must create a new copy of the entire entry and append it to the image. The only writable filesystems th…
The point is that an ISO image is just a file, and if that file is on a USB stick, it can be accidentally overwritten or deleted, same as any other file. And if someone really wanted to (in a black hat scenario), it would absolutely be possible to rewrite an ISO image on the fly to modify individual files.
You are correct that in black hat scenario, one could rewrite ISO image on the fly - after all, that's what I do when I upgrade my bootable USB stick to latest version.
But while ISOs are not perfect protection against malware, they are _great_ against accidental modification. On my PC, when I insert USB stick, the window pops up right away, and it takes 1 (one) mouse drag to make drive unbootable. No such problem exists with ISO images.
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If you write an ISO to a flash drive is it read only? Obviously optical media is inherently read only, but I haven't owned a machine with an optical drive in almost fifteen years and I don't have confidence any way of running an image (aside from a hypervisor) would preserve that property.
Hmm I don't think they are cryptographically protected, it's a security by difficulty thing (obscurity?) - iso is not a "simple" format so corrupting is not simple, either. On the other hand as you said, physical media can have a strong(er) security guarantee (write once at the physical layer), and iso's are easier to burn than disk images... Optical media can still be bought and drives still work fine...and there ar…
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I recall there's another one also. They replace the iOdd virtual CD USB device in all virtualized cases. For physical servers, the iOdd virtual ISO USB drive is very handy.
> there's another one You're probably thinking of Easy2Boot.
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I recall there's another one also. They replace the iOdd virtual CD USB device in all virtualized cases. For physical servers, the iOdd virtual ISO USB drive is very handy.
I have a similar drive enclosure from Zalman, which takes a 2.5" SATA drive.
http://iodd.kr/wordpress/product/iodd-2531/
https://www.zalman.com/US/Product/ProductDetail.do?pageIndex...
While the floppy disc and optical drive may have been retired to the domain retro computing, ISOs are still the standard delivery mechanism for most hypervisor OS installations. If you don't provided a convenient means to test your tiny OS, I'm not going to jump through hoops that could've been automated and solved at the scale of 1 release process vs. N users.
Which hoops?