TCG and the ThinkPad BIOS
Richard Stallman writes:
But [IBM's] cooperation is incomplete: when I asked for the specifications necessary to make LinuxBIOS run on [ThinkPad] laptops, IBM refused -- citing, as the reason, the enforcement of "trusted computing".
Does anyone have more technical details on this? It doesn't seem inherently necessary to TCG's design that users be prevented from loading their own BIOS. In any case, if the ThinkPad BIOS can be flashed, it's not as if users can be prevented from substituting their own BIOS. Is it possible that many of the TCG CRTM functions were implemented by IBM within its BIOS and simply can't be moved outside of the BIOS on current ThinkPad designs?
