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Comment by Dunedan | Hacker News Reader

> You can’t currently access the SSD, but that’s more the result of a driver not existing than it being inherently disallowed.

That's not clear yet. There is a NVMe driver available in Linux which works fine with pre-T2 Macs. On T2 Macs however the whole platform resets a few seconds after initializing the NVMe controller. The question is: Is that a bug in the driver or NVMe implementation of the T2 chip or something Apple does intentionally?

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I can envision a scenario where T2, when booted with Secure Boot disabled, tries to protect a Secure Boot OS and user data stored on the internal mass storage device in the event of the user subsequently re-enabling Secure Boot thus adding a layer of guarantee that everything is safe even during the time window when Secure Boot was disabled.

If intentional, this behaviour is nonetheless not documented in the whitepaper.

In such a scenario, a possible solution could be to offer an option to force an internal disk erasure upon toggling secure boot, in which case the internal device would be cleared for non-secure OS access.

That's interesting; I was not aware of the exact circumstances around why this driver didn't exist. Do you know where I could look to find more detail on the state of development for this?

Let's not attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to incompetence.

In a chip that has "secure" in its name, it's quite likely that a sudden system shutdown is intentional..

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