[OT] MRAM, spintronics, the future
Marcus Denker
marcus at ira.uka.de
Wed Feb 12 09:07:50 UTC 2003
On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 05:29:25PM +0100, goran.hultgren at bluefish.se wrote:
> Save a document? Start a program? Reboot? A filesystem? ...why? :-) All
> programs can be kept running all the time etc. A document can simply
> "stay" in memory. Why change representation into a bucket of bits?
>
Yes, MRAM is interesting. But: The things you want can be done today.
You don't need static memory to do a persistent object store: Just
add enough batery-power to allow saving the contents of the ram on the
disk in case of power-failure.
There are some nice papers about the Rio File Cache:
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/chen96rio.html
The Rio File Cache: Surviving Operating System Crashes
The interesting thing they found out is
a) operating system failurs do not corrupt application memory very
often
b) Ram-contents survive a warm reboot
===> The rio file cache (memory only) is nearly as reliable as a disk.
"These results stand in sharp contrast to the general feeling among
computer scientists".
They used RIO for building a *very* fast transaction system:
Free Transactions with Rio Vista
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/Rio/papers/vista.pdf
and discount checking (persistent execution state for normal
C programms):
Discount Checking: Transparent, Low-Overhead Recovery for General
Applikations
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/Rio/papers/discountChecking.pdf
Marcus
--
Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de -- Squeak! http://squeak.de
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