on GUIs and such things

[Kragen Sitaker]

> On Thu, Jul 20, 2000 at 08:45:10PM -0400, Kragen Sitaker wrote:
> > Persistence is useful for folks that need quick reboots; indeed,
> > Windows 2000 and Linux both have the ability now to persist a running
> > system image to disk so as to reboot more quickly; unfortunately, PCs
> 
> How do you do that on Linux?

With swsusp.

> > Palm-sized computers benefit from transparent persistence;
> > unfortunately, transparent persistence might not interact well with
> > ten-thousand-cycle flash RAM.  I'm not sure whether palm-sized
> 
> Well I think it's better to just leave the data in RAM all the time, 
> rather than copy it back to something that's artifically designed to 
> resemble "disk" space (FLASH).

Well, artificially designed to be nonvolatile, anyway.

>  This has been the approach of two
> of the more successful ones (Newton and Palm).

What kind of RAM does the PalmPilot family use for "nonvolatile" data?
DRAM?

> I think the big thing that 
> stops the idea is the reliability of software.  Memory leaks and 
> corruption are absolutely verboten when you aren't planning on 
> starting your memory image over from scratch once in a while.

EROS' approach is to isolate corruption within a single domain and
memory leaks within the children of a single spacebank.

> It would be best to exclusively use languages which prevent these problems.

Those languages have their own problems ;)

Also, you can't entirely prevent memory leaks; if you don't overwrite
unused pointers, you will still have them in Lisp or Java.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves        
possess.
                -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]