With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by colanderman on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:10PM (#7880144)

Or if you do all your work directly on the file in the RAM disk, you have to deal with filesystem overhead constantly.

Not so. Take a look at the Linux kernel implementation of memory-mapped ramdisk files. There is no "filesystem overhead". Zero. The kernel pretty much sets up the page mapping and then is hands-off.

Even if your memory mapping is backed by a file on a block device, the only overhead is occasional paging to disk. This happens on the order of SECONDS… not "constantly"!

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sp332 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @05:06PM (#7880443)

That's assuming you already have a file and know how big it should be. Or does it take the whole space for one file, and every program on the computer shares the space?

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by colanderman on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @07:45PM (#7881081)

Files can be both sparsely and dynamically allocated.

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