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Are there any existing operating systems that can handle a dynamically-changing amount of RAM? > The OS could gracefully page out to swap and power down the le
by pimlottc 10y ago
Are there any existing operating systems that can handle a dynamically-changing amount of RAM?
> The OS could gracefully page out to swap and power down the less efficient memory when switched to battery.
According to benchmarks, the SSD on the latest MacBook Pro hit 1.4GB/s. Even at this speed, it would take at least 10 seconds to flush 16GB of RAM to disk. I doubt your computer could do much while that was happening. I wouldn't call that very graceful.
- mcculley 10y ago> Are there any existing operating systems that can handle a dynamically-changing amount of RAM? Some implementations of Linux do this on exotic hardware (NUMA). > Even at this speed, it would take at least 10 seconds to flush 16GB of RAM to disk. It needn't happen atomically.
- rrdharan 10y agoSolaris on SPARC had the ability to dynamically add or remove RAM as I understand it. I believe IBM AIX (+ POWER maybe?) can do this too. Modern Linux kernels will let you hot-add memory but won't let you hot remove it.
- scurvy 10y agoYep, CPU's too. On the E4500's the CPU's and memory were on the same boards. You could remove the board after sending the right ASR commands. Then again, you were constantly swapping boards to find the ones not affected by EDP (ecache data parity) errors.
- throwaway7767 10y agoSome x86 boards have hot-pluggable memory too (it's a ACPI feature), it's been a very long time since that was a big-iron-only feature.
- nullc 10y agoRam hotplug is a standard linux kernel feature (obviously one that requires hardware support...)