Re: Rik's list of CS challenges

From: Helge Hafting <helgehaf@aitel.hist.no>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Terje Eggestad <terje.eggestad@scali.com>,
	Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Rik's list of CS challenges
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 10:26:30 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <3F696C36.4020604@aitel.hist.no> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 1063806002.12270.31.camel@dhcp23.swansea.linux.org.uk

Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mer, 2003-09-17 at 10:52, Terje Eggestad wrote:
> 
>>What become more interesting is that while you may have NV RAM, it's not
>>likely that MRAM is viable on the processor chip. The manufacture
>>process may be too expensive, or outright impossible, (polymers on chips
>>that hold 80 degrees C in not likely), leaving you with volatile
>>register and cache but NV Main RAM. 
> 
> 
> We effectively handle that case now with the suspend-to-ram feature.
> 
> 
>>A merge of FS and RAM? (didn't the AS/400 have mmap'ed disks?)
> 
> 
> Persistant storage systems. These tend to look very unlike Linux because
> they throw out the idea of a file system as such. The issues with
> debugging if they break and backups make my head hurt but other folk
> seem to think they are solved problems

I see no reason to get rid of file systems - they provide a nice
and established way of organizing data.  Persistent RAM offer
other advantages though - no need for disk caching, mmap
simply gives access to the memory, execute without loading first.

Helge Hafting