Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 25 May 1996 13:05:28 +0100 (BST) | From | Darren J Moffat <> | Subject | Re: The end of booting as we know it |
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On Fri, 24 May 1996, Warner Losh wrote:
First let me say I had this idea about 2 years ago after learning about Recoverable Virtual Memory and doing persistant databases. I eventually came to the conclusion that it was a great idea provided only one OS was involved.
> The Tadpole Sparc notebooks would dump all of the state machine to > either a special file or swap (can't recall which) and then just load > that machine image. It would, I believe, tell each device to > shutdown. On reload it would reinialize everything. I'm pretty sure
This is at least what would have to be done to get the machine back into the state it was in, but what happens to things like cache controllers etc..
As for the running programs what happens if my calendar program has just finished displaying my appointments for the day and issues a sleep for 24hrs I then "dump" the whole OS and don't restart for 3 days, the calendar program then sleeps for 23hrs 59minutes and shows me the appointments for 2 days ago.
Okay this is bad way to implement a calendar program but is serves a purpose to demonstrate that dates etal could get seriously screwed up with this sort of boot strategy.
> totally chaotic. Open files were still open, however, and programs
What if one of the open files was on your mounted dos partition and the user switched to dos and used the file, eg deleted appended... This could cause major problems!
Please don't let me put you off this, I think it's a great idea but it has many considerations if your intention is to switch between different OSes.
Personally I just leave my machine in Linux and only reboot to play games in dos (which is all that is on my other partiton other than games - ie no windows or anything else!), the other reason I leave my machine on is my CMOS battery is flat and at 13quid I would spend less electricity leaving it on than to buy a new battery :-)
-- Darren J Moffat
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