NVRAM resuscitation (Was Re: SPARCstation 20 with SCSI2SD)

[Paul Koning]

> On Nov 28, 2018, at 9:43 AM, Ethan via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>> As an aside - once upon a time I worked for a company that made their own Sparc boards to fit inside a supercomputer and several of them were inside secure military/government establishments. Sometimes a board would fail and have to go back for a fix - and then the RTC/NVRAM chip had to be removed because - you know, those 64 bytes of battery backed RAM might just hold some state secret or something...
>> Fun days.
>> -Gordon
> 
> Surprised they knew about it!

One of the documents hardware engineers have to generate is a "Statement of Volatility" that lists every component in the system with persistent memory of any kind.  For each, it says what is in that memory, where it is located, and how (if it can contain anything like user data or configuration settings) it can be erased or removed.

The NVRAM chip Gordon mentioned would show up in such an SOV.

	paul