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No More Rebooting?
blankmange writes: "This headline caught my eye: 'The End of Computer Rebooting.' Seems that there has been some new developments in memory technology: The new thin-film technology that could give rebooting the boot is based on resistor logic rather than the traditional transistor logic used in most PCs and other memory-enabled devices. It also is considerably faster than current memory systems and holds the promise of reducing the time required to transfer and download multimedia content and other massive files. This is great news, but what am I going to do with the extra hour or so a day?"
My Win2k boxen are stable enough to be up for months without a reboot. What I need is a box that I can leave on 24-7 and not have to worry about energy consumption. These things are expensive to leave awake all day. Seriously. Do the math.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
This seems like a bad bad title. This stuff is persistent RAM, so it won't help you if you need to reboot after recompiling a kernel. Also, this article doesn't mention getting rid of POST...most computers stuff some data into memory and check it to make sure your ram is still working. Would be kind of hard to check your memory if it has stuff in it that you don't want to lose.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
It just talks about memory that doesn't lose state when you hit the power button on your PC.
We've got to invent perfect software that can run forever without needing to be restarted, first.
Well, rebooting is MUCH more that just recovering the memory content!!
We could easily dump the memory contents onto the hard drive straigh away and we are not doing it (except in laptops, but even there it doesn't always work) This is because rebooting reinitializes various devices and takes care of the time jump (i.e. crons, anacrons, etc). The more complicated your system is the less likely it is that you are going to survive without booting.
Also, computers are now 1000 times faster than 10 years ago and they take much more time to boot (DOS did it in seconds on 286).
Last time I checked, downloading speed depended on your connection, not how fast your RAM goes. I'm sure my memory can handle more than 1.5 Mb/s but that's as fast an I can download, because that is the limit of my DSL line.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
What the article seems to be saying is that there could be a way of producing non-volatile memory which is so cheap, you'll be able to use NVRAM instead of ordinary RAM in your computers. But that depends on no further falls in RAM prices - I wouldn't bet on this technology taking over.
However, a cheap, fast non-volatile memory which can be written and read unlimited times could be a very useful supplement to RAM. Think journalling filesystems for example - put your ext3 journal in a 100Mbyte NVRAM device and you'd hardly need to touch the hard disk for hours at a time, given moderate use. (Eg notebooks could spin down the drive.) This is possible already, but NVRAM devices are relatively expensive and most PCs don't have them.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Did anybody else run into a 404 when you clicked "read more"? /. is slippin'...
Well, as my collegues have pointed out, I must say that the title was misleading. This has been thought about a lot, it's applications and implications, but without proper software, it won't eliminate the reboot. That's like saying a video card that can project 3d indisinguishable from reality, and which provides an api for its own ui, will eliminate the reboot.
It's just one more step -- hell, linux boxen are approaching record uptimes of years! (right?)
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boat
I see the reboot issue as minor, compared to the other potential advantages of this technology. I will expect to be rebooting, for one reason or another, for years to come and am not too bothered.
The article glosses over what I consider the important advantages:
- [assumedly] great power savings. Great for portables and remote embedded systems.
- No moving parts! If this tech can really replace and even surpass in speed, Hard Disk Drives, reliability and performance should make a gain of at least an order of magnitude.
I've been waiting for years for computers to become eletronic-only devices. I've harped before that CRT's (vaccum tubes, for God's sake!) and HDD's need to join the Dodo in oblivion. This new tech, in the common mass storage area (HDD's, CD'c, floppies), along with flat panel technology, would put us right on the verge of that ideal. The last hurdle would be cooling without moving parts.
I understand that's booting and not rebooting that technology promise to get rid of. But how did you do hardware reset, IRQ/DMA peripherical association without a boot sequence? How the CPU state is stored to go back where you have been before shut down (as CPU registers are not stored in main memory)? Did you need special OS to detect this kind of memory and work with it?
To be fair half of the time the problem is *not* something someone sitting 1000 miles away can help with.
Say you have lingering threads with open ports or something. How are you supposed to figure that out over the phone [and recall you have to tell some 65 yr old lady trying to write her grandson how todo this].
Most of the time people run stupid third-rate programs like Go!Zilla or Gator or dare I say anything based on linux! They screw up the system and there is not much you can do.
If on the other hand you said "My modem online light is off" and they retort "reboot your PC" you can be assured they are fairly clueless.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This is among my primary complaints about Windows: it's difficult to get useful info from the OS. On a unix system you can run netstat piped through grep to look for open connections, as a simple example.
...etc..." but can the average user?
While to a certain level this is true. You can always do this too
ipconfig -all | more
to figure out whats what in win2k.
Also, *you* can run "netstat | grep "eth0" | sendmail
With most ISPs the hardest tech problem a level 1 techy will ever face is DHCP lease problems. e.g. I can't renew my lease whats up?
So paying a level 1 with a university PhD or something is a waste of money since the hardest problem they face on average is "how do I setup email?".
When the problem escalates thats when level 2 techies get involved.
As to the comment about command lines... I disagree. Just to figure out whats up with a net connection you *should* be able to point and click. In win2k I can right click on my network icon to see if I am connected. In that dialog I can click "properties" and setup my TCP settings, etc...
Ideally the users would be familiar with the command line and its neato tools [specially if you have Cygwin installed] unfortunately the average user will never need such tools.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.