Kevin,

I think you mis-understood Craig.  He wasn't talking about the VM binary; he
was talking about the image file.  He wanted to know if we could use the
image file directly from storage RAM without duplicating the contents into
the heap.

> does not WinCE support XIP (execute-in-place)?

On WinCE, you can just handle the image using the memory mapped file
solution I outlined earlier.

For that matter, the same could be used to (optionally) handle other files
if my suggestion to support memory mapped files is adopted.

> iPaq/Linux however, is a different story.  Current images use JFFS2 [...]

I raised the issue of mmap on handhelds.org, and got back the word from
Jamey.  The answer from Jamey is that:

"It depends on the filesystem in which you are opening the fd.  If you're
using ramfs, it's certainly just mapping the memory.  If you're using cramfs
or jffs2, then it is mapping a copy of the data because the data is kept
compressed in flash but has to be presented uncompressed to the
application.  Even in this case, the use of mmap should reduce the number of
times the data is copied."

Remember ... we are talking about the image file, not the VM binary.

Note: the use of a memory mapped image needs to be optional, since one might
want to remove a CF chip containing the image, while still running Squeak.

	--- Noel