Recent searches
Search options
absolutely cursed idea: external RAM
have it appear as a USB storage device but it's actually backed by a pile of DRAM chips, tell your OS to use it as swap space, now you have more RAM in a way that is mostly not dependent on special hardware or OS support
@emily pcie / thunderbolt ramdisk?
@azonenberg ... actually, there's a memory controller device class, can you just slap actual RAM on the PCIe bus without the swap file hack or is that just "controller" as in "boop the ram chips for setup purposes but normal memory access doesn't go through this"?
@emily don't know never looked into it. Maybe pcie ramdisk is an established device type?
@azonenberg @emily Isn't that just CXL? Basically "how to put memory on the other side of a pcie link and have coherent access to it" ...
@acsawdey @azonenberg huh yeah i guess it is
other companies have tried this too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM) but CXL is the only modern thing i can find
@emily @azonenberg Yeah I think CXL is still in that "will it succeed" phase ... it could be used to put huge cheap ram on a server, or you could use it to attach flash that was directly memory addressed instead of being treated like a disk.
Now in theory you could do something like that with thunderbolt which I think has a couple bit-lanes of pcie going on under the hood?