There's a bunch of portable devices out there that can take SSDs, but do not have a physical keyboard built in. I'm especially thinking about tablets and handheld devices like the Steam Deck.
Right now, using them with an OPAL SSD basically means that you cannot boot them up anymore without having a physical keyboard around, ready to be attached, since you cannot enter your password without one in the PBA. There's no GUI, so no on-screen keyboard can be displayed to type in a password with the touchscreen. (It might also not contain touchscreen drivers?) There's also no Bluetooth support, so you can't connect a keyboard via that, either. (You'd need one with a USB dongle, at minimum.)
At best you could split the drive up with locking ranges, and keep the range holding the OS unlocked, and then unlock the other ranges once you've booted up, I suppose. But that's not quite ideal.
From my understanding, the Shadow MBR is 128 MB. That's enough space to hold a tiny Linux distribution with a GUI, isn't it? There's Tiny Core Linux for example.
So in theory, touch support with an on-screen keyboard could be added, and Bluetooth drivers and a UI for managing Bluetooth stuff could be included.
That would be a big usability improvement for these devices. As they are by nature very portable, they're potentially even more at risk of theft, so having their SSD encrypted with OPAL would be great.
I know the chance of this ever being done is basically zero, but I still want to put it out here at least.
There's a bunch of portable devices out there that can take SSDs, but do not have a physical keyboard built in. I'm especially thinking about tablets and handheld devices like the Steam Deck. Right now, using them with an OPAL SSD basically means that you cannot boot them up anymore without having a physical keyboard around, ready to be attached, since you cannot enter your password without one in the PBA. There's no GUI, so no on-screen keyboard can be displayed to type in a password with the touchscreen. (It might also not contain touchscreen drivers?) There's also no Bluetooth support, so you can't connect a keyboard via that, either. (You'd need one with a USB dongle, at minimum.)
At best you could split the drive up with locking ranges, and keep the range holding the OS unlocked, and then unlock the other ranges once you've booted up, I suppose. But that's not quite ideal.
From my understanding, the Shadow MBR is 128 MB. That's enough space to hold a tiny Linux distribution with a GUI, isn't it? There's Tiny Core Linux for example. So in theory, touch support with an on-screen keyboard could be added, and Bluetooth drivers and a UI for managing Bluetooth stuff could be included. That would be a big usability improvement for these devices. As they are by nature very portable, they're potentially even more at risk of theft, so having their SSD encrypted with OPAL would be great.
I know the chance of this ever being done is basically zero, but I still want to put it out here at least.