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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

In article , Floyd L. Davidson
wrote:

Pretty hard for the "boot" (system) drive to avoid being written on as
the system operates.


There is no reason that it needs to be written to. In
fact it is very easy to have a system that boots from a
DVD!


although it's possible, it's rare. most unix systems boot from writable
media, either hard drive or ssd, and swap space is on it, not that it
matters since ssd is more reliable than a hard drive would be.
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In article , William Sommerwerck
wrote:

Well... Mac Book Air owners don't actually /do/ anything with their
computers. They just carry it around to show off, and occasionally some
piddly thing with it.


actually they do quite a bit, as do macbook pro and imac users, which
can be configured with ssd, or added later.
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In article , William Sommerwerck
wrote:

Current data suggest easily twice as reliable.


Under what conditions?


all conditions, and likely much more than twice.

I'm about to buy a new computer, and will almost certainly use flash memory
for the boot drive. But I guarantee there will be nothing on that drive that
has to be continually re- or over-written.

All the user-created files will be on a conventional hard drive -- unless I
can be convinced that flash drive is sufficiently reliable.


it looks like your mind is made up and aren't interested in facts,
however, flash is definitely more reliable and *substantially* faster.

Of course, I create a bootable copy of my current computer's drive every one
to three weeks, and keep intermediate copies of important files on a Zip
drive. I also periodically back up all user data to an external hard drive.


you should be doing backups a *lot* more frequently and better yet,
have it automated so you don't need to do anything for it to happen.

also, zip drives are about the worst possible backup media and too
small to be of much use even if they were reliable.

By the way, my Seagate hard drives are warranteed for five years and have
given me no trouble.


actually, they may only be warranted for 1 year, which is the shortest
in the industry (western digital is 2 year):

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/16/seagate_cutting_warranties/

Seagate is cutting most Barracuda and Momentus warranty periods down
to one year with others moving from five-year warranties to three.

Name a consumer flash drive that has that long a
warranty.


10 year warranty:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Pat...nty-Torqx,8222.
html
The company is also backing the new drives with a huge 10-year
warranty, apparently the first of its kind in the industry.

5 year warranty:
http://newsroom.intel.com/community/...11/05/19/chip-
shot-new-5-year-limited-warranty-on-intel-ssd-320

Confident in the enhanced reliability features of its recently
introduced third-generation solid-state drive (SSD), Intel announced
it has extended its limited warranty for the Intel® SSD 320 Series
from three years to five years.
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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

nospam wrote:
In article , Floyd L. Davidson
wrote:

Pretty hard for the "boot" (system) drive to avoid being written on as
the system operates.


There is no reason that it needs to be written to. In
fact it is very easy to have a system that boots from a
DVD!


although it's possible, it's rare. most unix systems boot from writable
media, either hard drive or ssd, and swap space is on it, not that it
matters since ssd is more reliable than a hard drive would be.


Rare? Look at all those distribution "live DVD" disks. They're pretty
common. Look at Android. Look at all those millions of WIFI routers.

Sheesh, even the WT-5 wireless from Nikon runs Linux that boots from
a read only device.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)
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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

In article , Floyd L. Davidson
wrote:

Pretty hard for the "boot" (system) drive to avoid being written on as
the system operates.

There is no reason that it needs to be written to. In
fact it is very easy to have a system that boots from a
DVD!


although it's possible, it's rare. most unix systems boot from writable
media, either hard drive or ssd, and swap space is on it, not that it
matters since ssd is more reliable than a hard drive would be.


Rare?


yes.

Look at all those distribution "live DVD" disks. They're pretty
common.


what about them? how many people boot off a live dvd as part of their
normal day to day usage? nowhere near as many who boot off a hard drive
or ssd.

some computers, namely ultrabooks, don't even have dvd drives. sure you
could hook one up, but that defeats the point of having an ultrabook.

just because something is possible doesn't mean it's commonly done.

Look at Android.


bad example. android writes back to flash, as does ios.

Look at all those millions of WIFI routers.


why? embedded devices are single purpose devices and do not have swap
space, so they do not count.

Sheesh, even the WT-5 wireless from Nikon runs Linux that boots from
a read only device.


see above regarding embedded devices.


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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?


"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
Neil, he's saying that he's using it in a read-only (or read-mostly)
application, so it doesn't matter what the OS does.


It very much matters what the OS does, unless one can significantly
reconfigure the OS or use an OS that doesn't depend on virtual memory. To
my
understanding, neither has been made easier with more recent OSs.


No, he's not paging or swapping to the flash drive. That is instant
death.


Easy enough to configure the paging drive to a different drive from the boot
drive with any version of Windows. However these days you can just add more
RAM and not use a swap drive at all.

Trevor.


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In article , Trevor wrote:
"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
Neil, he's saying that he's using it in a read-only (or read-mostly)
application, so it doesn't matter what the OS does.

It very much matters what the OS does, unless one can significantly
reconfigure the OS or use an OS that doesn't depend on virtual memory. To
my
understanding, neither has been made easier with more recent OSs.


No, he's not paging or swapping to the flash drive. That is instant
death.


Easy enough to configure the paging drive to a different drive from the boot
drive with any version of Windows. However these days you can just add more
RAM and not use a swap drive at all.


Precisely! Virtual memory has become almost superfluous with such large
address spaces available so cheaply.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
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In article , Trevor
wrote:

Easy enough to configure the paging drive to a different drive from the boot
drive with any version of Windows.


not when there isn't a second drive available, such as in a laptop,
which is exactly where you are most likely to find ssd. plus, putting
virtual memory swap on an hd is dumb. it's much better to keep it on
the much faster ssd.
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"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
Precisely! Virtual memory has become almost superfluous with such large
address spaces available so cheaply.


I'd agree except for the "almost"!
I've been increasing speed by turning off the swap file for years.

Trevor.




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"George Kerby" wrote in message
...
On 7/23/12 8:46 AM, in article , "William
Sommerwerck" wrote:
wahhhhhhh READ WHAT I WROTE
Someone **** in your Cheerios this morning?


Little Willie Winter****** stores his Cheerios in a **** barrell.





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nospam wrote:
In article , Floyd L. Davidson
wrote:

Pretty hard for the "boot" (system) drive to avoid being written on as
the system operates.

There is no reason that it needs to be written to. In
fact it is very easy to have a system that boots from a
DVD!

although it's possible, it's rare. most unix systems boot from writable
media, either hard drive or ssd, and swap space is on it, not that it
matters since ssd is more reliable than a hard drive would be.


Rare?


yes.

Look at all those distribution "live DVD" disks. They're pretty
common.


what about them? how many people boot off a live dvd as part of their
normal day to day usage? nowhere near as many who boot off a hard drive
or ssd.

some computers, namely ultrabooks, don't even have dvd drives. sure you
could hook one up, but that defeats the point of having an ultrabook.

just because something is possible doesn't mean it's commonly done.

Look at Android.


bad example. android writes back to flash, as does ios.

Look at all those millions of WIFI routers.


why? embedded devices are single purpose devices and do not have swap
space, so they do not count.

Sheesh, even the WT-5 wireless from Nikon runs Linux that boots from
a read only device.


see above regarding embedded devices.


So you do admit it is not at all rare! It's easy to do, commonly
done, and if security is the most significant issue...

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)
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"Trevor" wrote:
"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
Precisely! Virtual memory has become almost superfluous with such large
address spaces available so cheaply.


I'd agree except for the "almost"!
I've been increasing speed by turning off the swap file for years.


Turning off the swap file should not increase speed.

First, if you are actually swapping out running programs, turning
off swap is not going help anything but will probably cause either
a system crash or some programs to be killed.

But second, and I have no idea if Windows does this or not but any
decent OS should swap out inactive data segments to provide more
RAM for use as disk cache. That is, allowing at least some swap to
be used will result in a faster system overall.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)
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Scott Dorsey writes:

Precisely! Virtual memory has become almost superfluous with such large
address spaces available so cheaply.


Backing a 64-bit address space without a swapping or paging file requires
17,179,869,184 gigabytes of RAM, so virtual memory isn't likely to become
superfluous any time soon.
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Floyd L. Davidson writes:

Turning off the swap file should not increase speed.


It depends. Some operating systems perform mandatory swaps even when they are
not required, and since every swap requires physical disk I/O, this can slow
down an operating system a great deal in some conditions. I once speeded up a
system considerably by making a one-instruction change that eliminated a
routine swap on every keyboard I/O.

I don't recall off-hand if Windows does this type of swapping or not. When it
happens it's often a legacy of the old days.

First, if you are actually swapping out running programs, turning
off swap is not going help anything but will probably cause either
a system crash or some programs to be killed.


Windows will run without a swap file. If there's not enough RAM, it will slow
to a crawl. If there are vast amounts of RAM available, it will run just fine.

But second, and I have no idea if Windows does this or not but any
decent OS should swap out inactive data segments to provide more
RAM for use as disk cache.


No, this is usually a design mistake as I've described above. Routine swapping
in a modern OS just "on principle" is almost universally a bad idea.


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nospam writes:

not when there isn't a second drive available, such as in a laptop,
which is exactly where you are most likely to find ssd. plus, putting
virtual memory swap on an hd is dumb. it's much better to keep it on
the much faster ssd.


Swap and paging files receive a tremendous amount of I/O in most systems,
enough to burn through some SSDs in short order. If you can afford SSD for
swap/paging, you can afford enough RAM to make I/O to swap or paging
unnecessary (in many cases).
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Floyd L. Davidson writes:

Most Linux distributions provide a "live DVD" which can
be used to demonstrate the OS, also as a installation
disk, and then also as a rescue disk.


Demonstrating and productively using are two different things. An operating
system being used for productive work is always writing to disk.

Any OS that cannot do that is abjectly insecure.


There's no correlation between being able to boot and run from read-only media
and security.
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isw writes:

Doesn't that make it a bit difficult to add kernel extensions (drivers)?


It makes it impossible to durably add anything, since any changes require a
write to non-volatile media.
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"Floyd L. Davidson" wrote in message
...
I've been increasing speed by turning off the swap file for years.


Turning off the swap file should not increase speed.

First, if you are actually swapping out running programs, turning
off swap is not going help anything but will probably cause either
a system crash or some programs to be killed.

But second, and I have no idea if Windows does this or not but any
decent OS should swap out inactive data segments to provide more
RAM for use as disk cache. That is, allowing at least some swap to
be used will result in a faster system overall.


Like with all things, *IF* Windows did everything perfectly there would be
no need to optimise it for your own use. Unfortunately it doesn't. Writing
swap files when there is plenty of RAM, and no need for more space is
something it does by default. In fact the more RAM you have the bigger it
thinks the swap file should be by default.
I never suggested one should disable the swap file if you don't have enough
system RAM, that's just silly. However these days when 16GB RAM is not
exceptional or even very expensive, thinking that Windows is going to manage
it for best use is still wishful thinking IME.
YMMV.

Trevor.


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It very much matters what the OS does, unless one can
significantly reconfigure the OS or use an OS that doesn't
depend on virtual memory. To my understanding, neither
has been made easier with more recent OSs.


Neil, you raised a good point that I hadn't fully through through.

Windows creates what used to be called a swap file that is continually
written to and read from. I don't want that on my SSD. Fortunately, you can
tell Windows where to put it.




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You should be doing backups a *lot* more frequently
and better yet, have it automated so you don't need
to do anything for it to happen.


The MOBO I've selected directly supports several RAID flavors. How I'll
configure it I haven't decided.


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In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

not when there isn't a second drive available, such as in a laptop,
which is exactly where you are most likely to find ssd. plus, putting
virtual memory swap on an hd is dumb. it's much better to keep it on
the much faster ssd.


Swap and paging files receive a tremendous amount of I/O in most systems,
enough to burn through some SSDs in short order.


except, they don't.

If you can afford SSD for
swap/paging, you can afford enough RAM to make I/O to swap or paging
unnecessary (in many cases).


wrong.
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In article , Floyd L. Davidson
wrote:

Pretty hard for the "boot" (system) drive to avoid being written on as
the system operates.

There is no reason that it needs to be written to. In
fact it is very easy to have a system that boots from a
DVD!

although it's possible, it's rare. most unix systems boot from writable
media, either hard drive or ssd, and swap space is on it, not that it
matters since ssd is more reliable than a hard drive would be.

Rare?


yes.

Look at all those distribution "live DVD" disks. They're pretty
common.


what about them? how many people boot off a live dvd as part of their
normal day to day usage? nowhere near as many who boot off a hard drive
or ssd.

some computers, namely ultrabooks, don't even have dvd drives. sure you
could hook one up, but that defeats the point of having an ultrabook.

just because something is possible doesn't mean it's commonly done.

Look at Android.


bad example. android writes back to flash, as does ios.

Look at all those millions of WIFI routers.


why? embedded devices are single purpose devices and do not have swap
space, so they do not count.

Sheesh, even the WT-5 wireless from Nikon runs Linux that boots from
a read only device.


see above regarding embedded devices.


So you do admit it is not at all rare! It's easy to do, commonly
done, and if security is the most significant issue...


it is definitely rare. who boots off a dvd as part of their day to day
computer usage? almost nobody.
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In article , William Sommerwerck
wrote:

Windows creates what used to be called a swap file that is continually
written to and read from. I don't want that on my SSD. Fortunately, you can
tell Windows where to put it.


you absolutely want swap on ssd because it's significantly faster than
hd. stop worrying about wearing out ssd. you'll be wanting to replace
the computer with a better model long before an ssd wears out.
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In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

Precisely! Virtual memory has become almost superfluous with such large
address spaces available so cheaply.


Backing a 64-bit address space without a swapping or paging file requires
17,179,869,184 gigabytes of RAM, so virtual memory isn't likely to become
superfluous any time soon.


nonsense. 64 bit address space can address *significantly* more memory
than 16 gig, which actually is not that much these days. you are going
to have swap if you do anything major with your computer, even with
that much memory.


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"Steve King" wrote in message
news:
:
"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...


I just had a client who needed to restore some backups after a total loss
type hard drive crash. His USB flash drive had about 9 GB of data. It
blue-screened the laptop its data needed to be restored to after a few
minutes of loading. Its reliability for just reading was poor on 3 other
desktop systems. The drive disconnected itself from the system several
times during attempts at restoring it, and on one machine that normally
works well, it would just sit in a loop attaching, crashing, and
re-attaching. On another older laptop the whole 9 GB flowed to its hard
drive (a flash-based SSD) just fine in one clean shot. I moved the data
to the target machine over a wireless LAN without incident.

YMMV.


Would be interesting to know your client's blood pressure swings as the
recovery attempts/failures went on;-) This is a good story to remind me
that if a USB Flash drive fails to read on one machine to keep trying.

Steve King


I just dumped and reloaded Vegas Pro 11, and before I ran some
tests that had caused Pro to crash ever more frequently in the
past, I thought to remove the USB 4-gig thumb-drive from the
computer before reloading the program. The thumb drive may not
have been the cause of the problems, but without it and with
the new installation, Vegas Pro 11 passed my tests and did not
crash. 8^)
--DR

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"William Sommerwerck" writes:

It very much matters what the OS does, unless one can
significantly reconfigure the OS or use an OS that doesn't
depend on virtual memory. To my understanding, neither
has been made easier with more recent OSs.


Neil, you raised a good point that I hadn't fully through through.


Windows creates what used to be called a swap file that is continually
written to and read from. I don't want that on my SSD. Fortunately, you can
tell Windows where to put it.


After years and years of dealing with all the quirks and stupid aspects of windows,
I'd LOVE to tell windows "where to put it...."

Frank
Mobile Audio


--
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William Sommerwerck wrote:
It very much matters what the OS does, unless one can
significantly reconfigure the OS or use an OS that doesn't
depend on virtual memory. To my understanding, neither
has been made easier with more recent OSs.


Neil, you raised a good point that I hadn't fully through through.

Thank you, William. I do try to read with comprehension and consider the
content before responding.

Windows creates what used to be called a swap file that is continually
written to and read from. I don't want that on my SSD. Fortunately,
you can tell Windows where to put it.

However, the swap file is not necessarily the only consideration. Such
things as tmp files are typically managed by applications, not Windows, and
the apps don't always give you an option for relocating those files to
another drive. Perhaps some other OS can force those kinds of app functions,
which is why I asked the question rather than make a definitive statement.
;-)

--
best regards,

Neil






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"Neil Gould" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck wrote:


It very much matters what the OS does, unless one can
significantly reconfigure the OS or use an OS that doesn't
depend on virtual memory. To my understanding, neither
has been made easier with more recent OSs.


Neil, you raised a good point that I hadn't fully thought through.


Thank you, William. I do try to read with comprehension and
consider the content before responding.


Windows creates what used to be called a swap file that is
continually written to and read from. I don't want that on my
SSD. Fortunately, you can tell Windows where to put it.


However, the swap file is not necessarily the only consideration.
Such things as tmp files are typically managed by applications,
not Windows, and the apps don't always give you an option for
relocating those files to another drive. Perhaps some other OS
can force those kinds of app functions, which is why I asked the
question rather than make a definitive statement. ;-)


Installation software has an annoying habit of defaulting to the software
directory(s) on C -- and some programs won't let you choose another
location. This has always been annoying, as my hard drive is partitioned as
C ("bootdisk"), D ("software"), E ("userdata") and F ("swapfile"). It's
gotten worse as Microsoft increasingly attempts to hide the hard disk's
contents from the user. (I want to put things where I think they should go,
and be able to find them.)

I'm very much aware of the interrelated issues of disk reliability and
easily created backups. In addition to biweekly full, bootable backups
of the entire hard drive (Copy Commander does this nicely), I also
periodically copy the entire E drive to an external hard drive, which
captures almost all my user data (except (principally) e-mail, which I've
never moved from C).

I guess I can live with 1M write cycles. grin As the ASUS board I've
chosen doesn't need a graphics card or sound card, the money saved can be
applied to a high-performance SSD.


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In article , Floyd L. Davidson
wrote:

Pretty hard for the "boot" (system) drive to avoid being written on as
the system operates.

There is no reason that it needs to be written to. In
fact it is very easy to have a system that boots from a
DVD!


Doesn't that make it a bit difficult to add kernel extensions (drivers)?


Drivers and other kernel extensions are linked dynamically in
RAM, not on disk (which indeed is the way it was accomplished
up through the 1980's).


but to add them, you must have a writeable volume.
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Neil Gould Neil Gould is offline
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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

William Sommerwerck wrote:
"Neil Gould" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck wrote:


It very much matters what the OS does, unless one can
significantly reconfigure the OS or use an OS that doesn't
depend on virtual memory. To my understanding, neither
has been made easier with more recent OSs.


Neil, you raised a good point that I hadn't fully thought through.


Thank you, William. I do try to read with comprehension and
consider the content before responding.


Windows creates what used to be called a swap file that is
continually written to and read from. I don't want that on my
SSD. Fortunately, you can tell Windows where to put it.


However, the swap file is not necessarily the only consideration.
Such things as tmp files are typically managed by applications,
not Windows, and the apps don't always give you an option for
relocating those files to another drive. Perhaps some other OS
can force those kinds of app functions, which is why I asked the
question rather than make a definitive statement. ;-)


Installation software has an annoying habit of defaulting to the
software directory(s) on C -- and some programs won't let you choose
another location. This has always been annoying, as my hard drive is
partitioned as C ("bootdisk"), D ("software"), E ("userdata") and F
("swapfile"). It's gotten worse as Microsoft increasingly attempts to
hide the hard disk's contents from the user. (I want to put things
where I think they should go, and be able to find them.)

Should I scream, "read what I wrote"? ;-)

I don't know what you intend to do with your computer, so I can't know what
the impact of the tmp files I wrote about might be in your case. IME, many
applications write tmp files that are not a part of the Windows OS's file
management. Files from audio apps can be very large and get re-written
frequently, so it would be difficult, if not impossible to "guarantee" that
such operations would not happen, which is why I asked.

--
best regards,

Neil



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Floyd L. Davidson Floyd L. Davidson is offline
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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

Mxsmanic wrote:
Floyd L. Davidson writes:

Turning off the swap file should not increase speed.


It depends. Some operating systems perform mandatory swaps even when they are
not required, and since every swap requires physical disk I/O, this can slow


So name any system that has done that in the past 20
years or so...

And technically "every swap" does not require physical
disk I/O, simply because every program's executable code
is *already* available on disk. To add that as "swap"
merely requires adding the disk location to the kernels
list of swapped out segments.

....
First, if you are actually swapping out running programs, turning
off swap is not going help anything but will probably cause either
a system crash or some programs to be killed.


Windows will run without a swap file. If there's not enough RAM, it will slow
to a crawl. If there are vast amounts of RAM available, it will run just fine.


If it *has* available swap it slows to a crawl. If there
is no swap it necessarily either crashes or kills off
processes.

But second, and I have no idea if Windows does this or not but any
decent OS should swap out inactive data segments to provide more
RAM for use as disk cache.


No, this is usually a design mistake as I've described above. Routine swapping
in a modern OS just "on principle" is almost universally a bad idea.


Bull**** sonny, you don't have a clue.

RAM that is not being used by running processes is
typically used for disk cache, and the more that is
available the better. Therefore any program data
segments that are never being accessed can and should be
paged to the swap device, thus freeing up physical RAM
that allows the system to run faster by caching disk
reads.

Note that that applies only to the data segements,
because program code that executes is never put into the
swap space to begin with, as it is just directly read in
from the already available program binary file.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)
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Floyd L. Davidson Floyd L. Davidson is offline
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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

Mxsmanic wrote:
nospam writes:

not when there isn't a second drive available, such as in a laptop,
which is exactly where you are most likely to find ssd. plus, putting
virtual memory swap on an hd is dumb. it's much better to keep it on
the much faster ssd.


Swap and paging files receive a tremendous amount of I/O in most systems,


That is not true of any modern OS.

enough to burn through some SSDs in short order. If you can afford SSD for
swap/paging, you can afford enough RAM to make I/O to swap or paging
unnecessary (in many cases).


That is true.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)
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Floyd L. Davidson Floyd L. Davidson is offline
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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

Mxsmanic wrote:
Floyd L. Davidson writes:

Most Linux distributions provide a "live DVD" which can
be used to demonstrate the OS, also as a installation
disk, and then also as a rescue disk.


Demonstrating and productively using are two different things. An operating
system being used for productive work is always writing to disk.


That is your imagination at work, but regardless it is
not pertinant to the question asked and the answer
provided.

Can it be done? Yes. Is it often done? Yes.

Any OS that cannot do that is abjectly insecure.


There's no correlation between being able to boot and run from read-only media
and security.


You are clueless.

If the boot device is an R/O device, there is no such
thing as compromising the booted OS. Think about it...

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)


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Floyd L. Davidson Floyd L. Davidson is offline
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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

Mxsmanic wrote:
isw writes:

Doesn't that make it a bit difficult to add kernel extensions (drivers)?


It makes it impossible to durably add anything, since any changes require a
write to non-volatile media.


That has nothing to do with adding kernel extensions. The in memory kernel
is modified by loadable modules. The kernel on disk is not modified at all.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)
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Floyd L. Davidson Floyd L. Davidson is offline
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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

"Neil Gould" wrote:
Neil, he's saying that he's using it in a read-only (or read-mostly)
application, so it doesn't matter what the OS does.

It very much matters what the OS does, unless one can significantly
reconfigure the OS or use an OS that doesn't depend on virtual memory. To my
understanding, neither has been made easier with more recent OSs.


Perhaps with OS's from MicroSoft, but every other OS can and does do
exactly that.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)
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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

nospam wrote:
In article , Floyd L. Davidson
wrote:

Pretty hard for the "boot" (system) drive to avoid being written on as
the system operates.

There is no reason that it needs to be written to. In
fact it is very easy to have a system that boots from a
DVD!

although it's possible, it's rare. most unix systems boot from writable
media, either hard drive or ssd, and swap space is on it, not that it
matters since ssd is more reliable than a hard drive would be.

Rare?

yes.

Look at all those distribution "live DVD" disks. They're pretty
common.

what about them? how many people boot off a live dvd as part of their
normal day to day usage? nowhere near as many who boot off a hard drive
or ssd.

some computers, namely ultrabooks, don't even have dvd drives. sure you
could hook one up, but that defeats the point of having an ultrabook.

just because something is possible doesn't mean it's commonly done.

Look at Android.

bad example. android writes back to flash, as does ios.

Look at all those millions of WIFI routers.

why? embedded devices are single purpose devices and do not have swap
space, so they do not count.

Sheesh, even the WT-5 wireless from Nikon runs Linux that boots from
a read only device.

see above regarding embedded devices.


So you do admit it is not at all rare! It's easy to do, commonly
done, and if security is the most significant issue...


it is definitely rare. who boots off a dvd as part of their day to day
computer usage? almost nobody.


Who boots in day to day computer usage?

I rebooted my computers last week due to an extended
power outage. It was the first time in more than a year
that any of them had been rebooted.

With the single exception of my WIFI router that gets
rebooted about once every two weeks. It of course boots
from the r/o device you say is so rare as to never be
used.

The point still remains that there are multimillions of
systems out there being boot *every day* from r/o devices.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)
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Floyd L. Davidson Floyd L. Davidson is offline
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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

nospam wrote:
In article , Floyd L. Davidson
wrote:

Pretty hard for the "boot" (system) drive to avoid being written on as
the system operates.

There is no reason that it needs to be written to. In
fact it is very easy to have a system that boots from a
DVD!

Doesn't that make it a bit difficult to add kernel extensions (drivers)?


Drivers and other kernel extensions are linked dynamically in
RAM, not on disk (which indeed is the way it was accomplished
up through the 1980's).


but to add them, you must have a writeable volume.


No, you must have a *readable* volume.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)
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Default Has your memory card ever worn out?

In article , Floyd L. Davidson
wrote:

enough to burn through some SSDs in short order. If you can afford SSD for
swap/paging, you can afford enough RAM to make I/O to swap or paging
unnecessary (in many cases).


That is true.


it's not true. ssd may be more expensive than a similar capacity hard
drive, but it's not *that* expensive unless you get really huge
capacities. 128-256 gig ssd are very affordable.
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