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[Tom's Hardware] AMD 3D V-Cache enables RAM disk to hit 182 GB/s speeds - over 12X faster than the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (7 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux

There are <100MB Linux distributions. Is it theoretically possible to run an entire operating system without RAM, purely in CPU cache?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (4 children)

That's exactly what is done during bring up of new SoCs. Memory controllers are either non-functional in early prototypes or a miniature design is put into a bunch of FPGAs with only a single core and caches. The cache lines and TLB entries are primed and pinned with all relevant code and data pages before booting up a kernel.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think this is also what happens at boot on most systems before RAM is initialized, so maybe boot times could be faster if they took advantage of caches getting larger?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Not sure if you meant to point out something else but initramfs or ramdisks are loaded on to RAM itself which is already up and running at that point. RAM initialization is usually initiated by early boot firmware and information about the physical address map is eventually passed on to the OS kernel which later sets up paging (virtual memory).

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