Rusky wrote:
A lot of misunderstanding going on here.
The ability to force a clean reset has almost nothing to do with NVRAM- it just means you put all your non-persistent state (approximately everything we store in volatile RAM today) in one particular section of NVRAM that you can easily discard by deallocating it and jumping to the initialization code, which will then act as if that state had been lost (it's really still there, just treated as leftover garbage now).
This is why NVRAM makes little sense on a modern PC... If the "non-persistent" partition can be discarded, the OS has to be able to work without it, if it's not there. Therefore, it must keep all important information on the "persistent" partition. That's essentially what we have now, with Sleep mode and Hibernate mode. So it's probably not worth the trouble of redesigning the PC around NVRAM.
If the "non-persistent" partition can't be discarded, then the OS can assume it will always be there, and take advantage of it. But then the problem becomes stability over long periods of time. I think this is unrealistic, based on the fact that all software has some level of unexpected behavior, so I think the first approach is still the only real option, but I don't think it will get any market traction, for the reasons listed above.
So, probably not worth worrying about right now.
Quote:
Basically; "file system cache tweaks" is the only way to make use of non-volatile RAM that I've been able to think of (and it saddens me a little that I haven't been able to think of anything more interesting or more revolutionary
).
I wouldn't feel too bad. Microsoft tried to use USB thumb drives as a "tweak", when they added "Speed Boost", but I'll be d*** if I can tell a difference with it turned on. Fail.