Re (2): persistence-across-reboot; was Re: [Oberon] Re. HOW2 'magnify view' for BB?Aos?A2?

[Jack Johnson]

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 3:16 PM, <peasthope at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> From:   Jack Johnson <knap.... at gmail.com>
> Date:   Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:24:39 -0800
> > ... Smalltalk VM ...
>
> Virtual Machine?

Yep, many Smalltalk implementations have an image file that holds the
state of all the objects in the system (code and data), and a virtual
machine that loads and saves the image file as the method of
persistence.

There was a discussion thread a while back on the Squeak mailing lists
about how there are some Smalltalk virtual machines that have
essentially never been rebooted since the VM was compiled and the
first image loaded.  It may have been cloned several times and even
restored to a previous state, but from the system's perspective it's
been one contiguous run.

I've often thought that as traditional storage approaches access times
of RAM from a decade or two ago, why wouldn't we start designing more
operating systems to assume 200 GB or so of persistent state?

-Jack