On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 08:48 -0500, John W. Linville wrote:
On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 02:05:25AM -0800, Miles Lane wrote:
> This article introduces a bunch of new laptop technologies that
> Microsoft is supporting in Vista. According to the article,
> Is there any hardware specs are out there for these
> new chunks of hardware?
>
> Here's an article discussing the new gizmos:
>
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/23/windows_vista_laptops/page3.html
Sounds kinda cool. ReadyBoost sounds to me like a wizard for
using memory cards as swap space.
Using a memory card/stick as swap should already be possible on Linux.
You might gain some short term improvements, but many of the chips used
in those memory sticks have limited write cycles. Using it as swap
would likely significantly reduce the lifetime of the memory stick. The
other problem (mentioned in the article) is that most memory sticks
aren't that fast.
ReadyDrive sounds like it could
be self-contained in new hard drives, but I suppose it might need
some OS support or enablement.
If it's built into the drive and doesn't need any support from the OS,
Linux should be able to take advantage of it.
SuperFetch sounds like an actual OS
component -- something to make their VM more purposely aware of the
ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive features.
SuperFetch sounds to me like Microsoft's marketing folks are just making
a big deal out of a smarter virtual memory manager. Lots of work has
gone into Linux's virtual memory management so I doubt that there's much
to be learned from Microsoft on this front.
SideShow sounds cool, but it really does just look to be a built-in
PDA. It would be good get some specs to see if we could get Opie
or somesuch ready for it, and Fedora ready to sync with it "out of
the box".
If there are technical specs available, I'm sure someone will try
putting Linux on it.
Jeff