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Re:DRAM Changed the World by guerrilla on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @05:24AM (#41923328)
Cache is not general purpose as far as I know. I want to be able to do whatever I want with it.
Re:DRAM Changed the World by MichaelZuo on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @07:38AM (#41923926)
Where’s the market demand for that?
Re:DRAM Changed the World by ghaff on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @08:31AM (#41924355)
Yeah, 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.

Re:DRAM Changed the World by guerrilla on Friday October 25, 2024 @07:19AM (#41944166)
Effort? 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.
Re:DRAM Changed the World by guerrilla on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @12:53PM (#41926889)
Where is the market demand for faster RAM? This isn't a good question.
Re:DRAM Changed the World by MichaelZuo on Sunday October 27, 2024 @08:26AM (#41962058)
Gamers, 3D modelling professionals, IBM, HP, ORACLE, many IT departments, etc… ?
Re:DRAM Changed the World by myself248 on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @11:44AM (#41926218)
Coreboot 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.