[Oberon] Hypothetical flash RAM; was persistence-across-reboot

[peasthope at shaw.ca]

Date: Thu Apr 15 13:50:19 2010 Paul Reed wrote,
> Another reason to use a filesystem driver with flash memory is to take
> advantage of the implementation of wear-levelling ...

In principle, hardware wear leveling should be possible 
for flash RAM but maybe there are difficulties.

Another aspect is booting.  With the hypothetical flash 
RAM there would be nothing to "load" from non-volatile 
storage into RAM.  In other words, for a simple system, 
no boot loader; the cpu would go directly into the kernel 
event loop.  Even for multiple systems on one machine,
"boot loading" would be merely an address jump.

The complexity of booting of some contemporary 
systems is striking.  Grub 2 for example, soon to be 
standard for Debian Linux, has two or three stages, 
understands filesystems and has two layers of 
configuration.  In some ways, Grub has become more 
elaborate than ETHNO!  

Regards,           ... Peter E.





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