3 ms·
Cache is not general purpose as far as I know. I want to be able to do whatever I want with it.
by guerrilla 2y ago
Cache is not general purpose as far as I know. I want to be able to do whatever I want with it.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoWhere’s the market demand for that?
- ghaff 2y agoYeah, you’re basically betting that people will put a lot of effort in trying to out/optimize the hardware and perhaps to some degree the OS. Not a good bet. When SMP first came out we had one large customer that wanted to manually handle scheduling themselves. That didn’t last long.
- guerrilla 2y agoEffort? It's not like it's hard to map an SRAM chip to whatever address you want and expose it raw or as a block device. That's a 100 LOC kernel module.
- guerrilla 2y agoWhere is the market demand for faster RAM? This isn't a good question.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoGamers, 3D modelling professionals, IBM, HP, ORACLE, many IT departments, etc… ?
- myself248 2y agoCoreboot and some other low-level stuff uses cache-as-RAM during early steps of the boot process. There was briefly a product called vCage loading a whole secure hypervisor into cache-as-RAM, with a goal of being secure against DRAM-remanence ("cold-boot") attacks where the DIMMs are fast-chilled to slow charge leakage and removed from the target system to dump their contents. Since the whole secure perimeter was on-die in the CPU, it could use memory encryption to treat the DRAM as untrusted. So, yeah, you can do it. It's funky.