Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

How To Use a Terabyte of RAM

Posted by kdawson on from the every-factor-of-25-helps dept.

Spuddly writes with links to Daniel Philips and his work on the Ramback patch, and an analysis of it by Jonathan Corbet up on LWN. The experimental new design for Linux's virtual memory system would turn a large amount of system RAM into a fast RAM disk with automatic sync to magnetic media. We haven't yet reached a point where systems, even high-end boxes, come with a terabyte of installed memory, but perhaps it's not too soon to start thinking about how to handle that much memory.

2 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. uh - there is at least one system with 1TB of RAM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You wrote: "We haven't yet reached a point where systems, even high-end boxes, come with a terabyte of installed memory" - this is not true. Sun's E25k can go over 1TB of memory.....

  2. Re:Power Failure by itsjz · · Score: 5, Informative
    There's about three paragraphs in the article discussing this. Basically, use a UPS:

    If line power goes out while ramback is running, the UPS kicks in and a power management script switches the driver from writeback to writethrough mode. Ramback proceeds to save all remaining dirty data while forcing each new application write through to backing store immediately.