Why Intel is adding instructions to speed up non-volatile memory

Re:Why Intel is adding instructions to speed up non-volatile... by 0x0 on Thursday November 06, 2014 @06:00AM (#8566524)

Isn't there a higher risk of data loss, if your "hard drive" is 100% memory mapped - all it would take is one buggy kernel driver writing to an invalid pointer or memset'ing the whole thing to 0?

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Re:Why Intel is adding instructions to speed up non-volatile... by JoeAltmaier on Thursday November 06, 2014 @07:55AM (#8566760)

Certainly damage can happen faster, since the NVRAM is faster. But my buggy driver could write the whole disk to 0 already.

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Re:Why Intel is adding instructions to speed up non-volatile... by signa11 on Thursday November 06, 2014 @06:52AM (#8566623)

well, the same is true now as well right ? for example, a buggy driver can override a buffer-cache pointer with something else, and then you are hosed. if you are playing in the kernel-land and not careful enough, you are courting disaster...

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Re:Why Intel is adding instructions to speed up non-volatile... by 0x0 on Thursday November 06, 2014 @11:10AM (#8567641)

True, but if it overruns a buffer, it still needs to maintain a valid SCSI/ATAPI/whatever command packet format and submit the packet to the controller with repeatedly increasing block numbers - that's a lot of instructions, while something that clears the entire address space could probably be done in 1-2 assembly instructions (mov rcx, -1; rep stosq)

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