[Oberon] Non-volatile memory; was Re (3): persistence-across-reboot;

[peasthope at shaw.ca]

From: knapjack at gmail.com (Jack Johnson)
Date: Wed Apr 14 02:23:15 2010
> 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.

ETHNO runs on my old Toshiba Satellite T2100, 80486, 8 MiB RAM.
So non-volatile memory now available from Ramtron should be adequate.
Each of these is 2 MiB.
http://www.ramtron.com/products/nonvolatile-memory/serial-product.aspx?id=171
http://www.ramtron.com/products/nonvolatile-memory/serial-product.aspx?id=100

Interfacing 4 or 8 even 16 of them to a CPU must be possible.  That 
would easily support ETHNO; possibly A2.  Wear leveling is not involved.  
No boot loading; instant on.  Filesystems needed only for access to large 
data sets, legacy data and data from external sources.

Wouldn't be feasible for most conventional systems where nundreds of 
MiBs are used.  But we are interested in efficiency rather than grandiosity.

Regards,                          ... Peter E.





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