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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?"
So I guess this puts a big damper on Microsoft Tech Support. "I don't know what to do, please restart your computer."
So if I can't reboot, how am I supposed to recover from Windows crashes?
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.
Like your computer, you need downtime (sleep, walking the dog, eating, etc).
If you are an avid computer user, you may only get your downtime when your computer is rebooting. This is especially true in workplaces where people are "chained" to their computers trying to finish a project, etc.
Those ergonomics posters on the wall do very little to get an average 'puter user to take care of themselves.. reboots served some of this purpose.
(Maybe that is why windows crashes so much - it's Bill Gates' gift to the employee!)
In any case, perhaps all offices should institute a staggered mandatory 15 minute inactivity period every couple of hours for each active computer.
Goat sex free since 2001
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).
The press release doesn't really go into detail, so I don't know how similar (or disparate) the respective IBM and Samsung solutions are. They do both have the same net effect for users: non-volatile main memory.
This is cool stuff, but what hasn't been said is that as long as operating systems and applications leak memory, there will be a need for reboots.
Ciao.
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
People: Read the frelling article. This isn't 'an end to rebooting', it's highspeed nonvolatile memory that could theoretically be used to replace mass storage and RAM simultaneously. Although this would speed up booting a bit, it would not obviate rebooting entirely.
In fact, on some OSen (cough, Windows, cough) it could be very dangerous - if there's only one copy of the OS code in this combination memory, you can't reboot and reload a fresh copy from disk - meaning bugs have a significantly greater probability of rendering your system unusable.
Sounds like fun, right?
--
Damn the Emperor!
Back at the dawn of time, I was programming a (Data General) Nova II mini-computer which had "core" memory (which is where the term "core dump" comes from). Core consisted of tiny doughnut (ummm doughnuts) shaped magnets with (read/write) wires through it. It was incredibly slow by today's standards, but it did retain memory even when powered down. I'd shut the machine down at the end of the day. The next morning, I'd turn it on, and immediately pick up where I left off.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Hmm. Rebooting nowadays with 'traditional' OSes is to flush inappropriate state information out of the memory - an unusual sequence of events resulting in the system getting into a state it should never be in during regular operation....this might be either accidental (a crash) or semi-deliberate (an upgrade of a software component which needs a reboot to get it co-ordinated with the rest of the system). Having memory which maintains this state information will make the problem worse, not better!
What's needed here to achieve systems that don't need rebooting is operating systems which deal with all of these unusual events and states correctly..this means they'll catch errors and will be specifically designed to allow things like dynamic update to system compoents. I'm probably a bit biased but the best example a no-more-reboots kind of environment I see today is the OSGi.
So, when you turn off/on your PC, you don't need to reboot, it can just put you right back where you were instantly. Unfortunately, in the context of a crash/instability, this would put you right back in an inoperable/unstable environment.
Bad writeup.
True, you could pull different values (aka 1, 0, hell 2, 3, 4, 5) if you want) from resistance values.
I guess never having worked with resitance values as absolute, It never crossed my mind good point.
I think (I may be wrong) these magnatite are almost like "core memory" from days long gone, where a single bit was represented in memory by a single wound ferrite core, and I guess like you said pull distinct values from diffferent residtance values.
This sounds, upone rereading the article, even more like core memory on a film.
My dad saw, and showed me picture, yes im that old, of core memory being produced at IBM , thousands of ferrite cores beinghand tested and added to boards. Not bad in concept , but then again bubble memory for those old enough to remeber was a great concept too, there is still one Bubble manufacturer out there I am aware of upwards of 2 gigs, theyre using it as a solid state drive instead of ram (non-volitaile with somethinglike a 500? G shoch rating ?!?!)
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
This is an appalling summary - and the article is no better.
"The technology is highly suitable for broadband Internet connections, Hsu said, noting that it combines the features of low voltage, high speed and low power consumption."
Yes, fantastic. That's great for those broadband internet connections. Faster memory is always good, but choosing this as an application is just a moronic use of buzz words.
"Ignatiev said the new technology is about 1,000 times faster than flash, which is nonmechanical and currently the speediest memory on the market. "
Flash memory is the fastest type of memory on the market? No, it is a form of non-volatile memory, which is very slow by RAM standards.
"is based on resistor logic rather than the traditional transistor logic"
Actually, you'll find that DRAM in most modern computers are capacitative devices - the techniques to make them are the same as MOS transistors, but they do not use switching to store values, IIRC.
I wish people would not spout such rubbish.
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.
Interesting highlights:
The trasentric paper quoted Electronic Buyer's News:
The interesting elements of this:- Much of this research is funded by a DARPA contract which means it is the money of US Taxpayers at work.
- Samsung is part of the same contract.
Methinks that perhaps Samsung and IBM are using the same (or very similar) technology.The Wired article is fairly lengthy and also details the biography of Stuart Parkin. Parkin is the IBM fellow that has been driving most of the MRAM research.
Ciao.
This is great news, but what am I going to do with the extra hour or so a day?
Find a better operating system.
The article wasn't any better written than the summary. It seems like this is suitable as a replacement for flash memory, not for either disk (which is huge), or for RAM (which is really fast). Of course, having a flash-like technology be cost-effective would change things; you could keep a copy of system memory as it is when it has just been booted (but before it initializes devices) there. Then you "reboot" by copying the virtual memory table from the nvram to main memory, and the system is immediately ready to initialize devices and run.
It would also be useful if programs could put some of their data in the nvram region, so (for instance), your emacs buffers don't go away when the power goes out. It would also be a good place to put write buffers, such that, as soon as the data is written to nvram, it will definitely make it into the filesystem, whether or not you lose power. This means that you can accumulate more dirty buffers safely and write them out in larger chunks, which is more efficient.
Keeping everything in nvram (if that were fast enough) may or may not be a good idea. You'd still want to reboot on occasion to refresh the system (load a new kernel, e.g.), but there's no particular reason you'd want to reboot at exactly those times when you power down and back up. Of course, you'd need everything to be hotswappable (replace the processor with programs running?) and restartable (disks have to be told to spin up, e.g.).