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Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

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Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#161

Post by bkeroack »

itchyouch wrote: post #144
IgorPartola wrote: post #137

This is sort of the opposite of the RAM-based battery backed drives [1]. I can see this being immediately useful for things like large database servers: instead of re-priming caches on reboots you just have them already warmed up. You can also suddenly have a whole lot more "RAM" at the cost of its speed. I do have a hard time picturing what this will look like if it was as fast as traditional RAM. If I can store eve…

While block devices can go away, the notion of a file will probably continue to remain. We run clusters of ephemeral linux hosts, and while we use disk, we also have plenty of hosts that run diskless. The disk mount point just becomes a tmpfs mount and the required minimal installation is made on a tmpfs partition which amounts to a trivial amount for hosting busybox and some conf files in /etc. Linux does appear to…

Why bother?

I see two possibilities:

- Two separate address spaces, one volatile (RAM) and one persistent (SSD). "Writing" to persistent storage is as simple as "mov [src],[dst]".

- One global address space, with a page attribute of "volatile" (true/false). Writing is just as simple as above.

At that point the OS and userspace are free to create whatever abstractions are necessary on top. They don't necessarily need to be filesystems or files per se.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#162

Post by yuhong »

gtk40 wrote: post #141
avn2109 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously this. Don't worry, Windows 11 will certainly require 1TB to run MaterialAeroMetro 2022. The only thing worth debating is whether the GUI design pendulum will have swung between Flat/glossy an even or odd number of times by then :p

Windows minimum system requirements haven't changed since Windows Vista in 2006, up to Windows 10 technical preview.

Minimum RAM requirements to be more precise. In fact, I think they made the latest versions of Windows take less RAM.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#163

Post by sitkack »

Symmetry wrote: post #145
chongli wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws of physics don't dictate what technologies we know, only what their ultimate limits are. Just because our current memory technologies have some limitations that force us to make a tradeoff does not mean this will always be the case. Just look back at how things were before the discovery of GMR[0]. We had very different tradeoffs then as compared to now. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistanc…

As long as we care about computational latency, the forces that give rise to caching will continue to hold force. The speed of light places a fundamental limit on the response time from a storage system of a given physical volume, and there are equivalent physical laws on the maximum amount of information that can be stored in that volume. Which technologies we use for our caches and main storages will change, but we…

Assuming you are still using a von Neumann architecture. You are arguing past chongli, not with.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#164

Post by bduerst »

NamTaf wrote: post #3

I can't wait to see the programming paradigm of memory vs permanent storage begin to blur in the next 5 or so years. It's going to make some major assumptions about how you program stuff change quite significantly and it's really exciting.

What's the limiting factor today?

Aren't the latest versions of PCI-e SSDs already approaching early version DDR3 transfer rates?

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#165

Post by kale »

shkkmo wrote: post #134
avn2109 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously this. Don't worry, Windows 11 will certainly require 1TB to run MaterialAeroMetro 2022. The only thing worth debating is whether the GUI design pendulum will have swung between Flat/glossy an even or odd number of times by then :p

Windows 11? There isn't going to be a Windows 11, the version after 10 will be Windows 20, or maybe just Windows Cloud.

They'll release Windows One the same time the new xBox is announced as "xBox Infinity".

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#166

Post by zelos »

digi_owl wrote: post #153
luma wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HP is already working on this with what they're calling "The Machine". They're writing a new OS around the new storage technologies with the understanding that it might not make sense to separate RAM from disk pretty soon here. They've also suggested that they'll be porting versions of Linux and Android to this platform. Of course, all of this is pretty marketing heavy and not a lot of details have been released, so…

I seem to recall that early Palm devices used run-in-place, but i don't recall if they were able to maintain state if there was a power loss.

The early ones had a capacitor that held enough charge to allow you to change the batteries without losing state.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#167

Post by eslaught »

IgorPartola wrote: post #137

This is sort of the opposite of the RAM-based battery backed drives [1]. I can see this being immediately useful for things like large database servers: instead of re-priming caches on reboots you just have them already warmed up. You can also suddenly have a whole lot more "RAM" at the cost of its speed. I do have a hard time picturing what this will look like if it was as fast as traditional RAM. If I can store eve…

The file system (and associated baggage) exist because of a fundamental disparity between the speed (and nearness to compute) of smaller memories and the convenience (but relative slowness) of larger ones. While SSDs do certainly close this gap, I find it difficult to imagine that this gap will ever entirely close; if anything, physics guarantees that compute units with small, nearby memories will always be far, far faster than more distant memories. You might argue that SSDs are "fast enough" to dispense with the inconvenience that imposes, but I can certainly find things I'd rather do with the performance.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#168

Post by letstryagain »

jacquesm wrote: post #139
toyg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted nacnud because it's such a generic statement, you could post it to almost any thread. Net neutrality? "Think of the potential for viruses to spread!" iWatch? "Think of the viruses you could have on your watch!" New JS framework? "Think of the attacks it could enable!" Yeah, of course, everything has security implications and some technologies even more so, but unless one explains them and states how they…

Then you did not properly grok his comment in the first place.

Can you explain? Because I don't understand either.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#169

Post by jacquesm »

letstryagain wrote: post #168
jacquesm wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you did not properly grok his comment in the first place.

Can you explain? Because I don't understand either.

A new form of persistent storage is an enabler, it may create entirely new forms of attack. Whatever you cook up using Javascript, your watch or (that one is really reaching) Net Neutrality is not of the same degree at all, those are just (very slight) variations on existing themes.

Writable storage using a centralized access method (file system) is hard enough to purge and keep clean, having a memory mapped persistent chunk of storage that is user process level writable creates an entirely new class of problems.

Getting rid of viruses from BIOS flash is hard enough, this expands that concept to all of userspace.

I sincerely hope the 'x' bit will be off for such memory.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#170

Post by kalleboo »

IgorPartola wrote: post #137

This is sort of the opposite of the RAM-based battery backed drives [1]. I can see this being immediately useful for things like large database servers: instead of re-priming caches on reboots you just have them already warmed up. You can also suddenly have a whole lot more "RAM" at the cost of its speed. I do have a hard time picturing what this will look like if it was as fast as traditional RAM. If I can store eve…

> If I can store everything in RAM, from the OS binaries, to the running processes, it certainly has a kind of elegance to it.

Didn't Palm OS originally work this way? The early devices were too cheap for flash memory for anything more than the base OS, so they just stored everything in battery-backed RAM. If your batteries ran out, your device was wiped and had to be re-synced. Apps were run in-place in RAM. Then they had to hack in a bunch of workarounds when they added flash memory storage.

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