4 ms·
Batteries aren't static sensitive, and ROMs aren't available in gigabytes, but apart from that there is a certain appeal in a more secure OS environment. It's
by jrabone 14y ago
Batteries aren't static sensitive, and ROMs aren't available in gigabytes, but apart from that there is a certain appeal in a more secure OS environment.
It's a shame that (for example) Windows doesn't make it easier to make the entire system partition read-only, but applications are traditionally so abysmally poor at handling "no you can't write THERE" errors (yes, Photoshop, I'm looking at you) that most people gave up. UNIXes are better, but still at the mercy of morons (Acrobat has managed to drop files called "C:\nppdf32Log\debuglog.txt" all over my home directory, so it's probably just as well it's too fucking stupid to realise it's running on RHEL otherwise it'd be asking for root all the time instead)
- dfox 14y agoTrue ROM chips are by definition available in sizes slightly larger than similarly priced DRAM or SLC flash, it's probably cheapest memory to manufacture. And you would be surprised about how many megabytes of ROM are contained in Android/iOS devices (baseband code is often i mask ROM on chip, modern SoCs tend to have some kind of support core with code in mask ROM and also some ARM acessible mask ROM with things like "low-level" bootloader, if you count reading files from filesystem on MMC and relocating ELFs as "low-level"), even desktop PCs contain significant amount of mask ROM (CPU microcode, sometimes embedded controller code, microcode for various other chips, probably bootloaders for HDD controllers). Bottom line: flash is still more expensive than mask ROM, given enough volume (and by definition will always be).
- jrabone 14y agoSo who makes, say, 4GB E(E)PROM chips? I'm thinking Windows here, not Android. Clearly the technology isn't the problem but the largest ROMs I've worked with are all in the Mbit range.
- lazyjones 14y agoI don't think these are widely available ... Practical solutions for Windows would probably be DVD-ROMs or read-only NAS filesystems, or (for reasonable speed) SSDs, preferably PCIe or Mini-PCIe with hardware write-protect switch.