4 ms·

It’s not a bad idea, atime, just that our hardware never developed any tech where writes are as cheap as reads. Or even close. I wonder if that’s theoretically

• eru 3y ago
  When they were coming up with 'atime' and thought it was a good idea, it was because with their tech writes were about as cheap as reads.
• yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > just that our hardware never developed any tech where writes are as cheap as reads. Or even close. I wonder if that’s theoretically possible. I had it in my head that modern flash actually does read in a way that involves writing, and we just paper over that for the sake of the abstractions we use. Am I wildly misremembering?
  • jlokier 3y ago
    You might be thinking of DRAM, which does work that way. Reads discharge the memory array capacitance so the data has to be amplified and rewritten.
  • bravetraveler 3y ago
    As far as I know, reads are reads. Though, writes aren't quite so simple Sometimes blocks may have to be read and re-written elsewhere to make room... and this is what makes using TRIM and having cache on-disk so important.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Oh, I might have gotten it backwards; writes actually involving reads could make sense.