News: 0001597414

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Microsoft's RAMDAX Driver Merged For Linux 6.19 To Carve Out RAM As NVDIMM Devices

([Microsoft] 2 Hours Ago Microsoft RAMDAX)


The Non-Volatile Memory Device (NVDIMM) subsystem updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. Most notable this cycle for the NVDIMM code is a new open-source driver addition courtesy of Microsoft.

As talked about on Phoronix one month ago, a Microsoft Linux engineer working in official capacity at [1]Microsoft has contributed a "RAMDAX" driver for Linux to allow carving out regions of memory to create persistent memory interfaces exposed as NVDIMM devices.

[2]

This RAMDAX driver was designed for use-cases like virtual machine hosts to create "persistent" memory regions and to then access that RAM using FSDAX or DEVDAX.

As planned that new driver was included as part of the [3]NVDIMM pull request for Linux 6.19. As of today it's been [4]merged to Linux Git without any troubles. Aside from that new RAMDAX driver addition, there isn't any other really notable NVDIMM changes this cycle.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-RAMDAX-Linux-Driver

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=ramdax_carve_lrg

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/69331dd6ebdba_50fc7100e3@iweiny-mobl.notmuch/

[4] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=56a1a04dc9bf252641c622aad525894dadc61a07


Norbert Weiner was the subject of many dotty professor stories. Weiner was,
in fact, very absent minded. The following story is told about him: when they
moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing that he would be absolutely
useless on the move, packed him off to MIT while she directed the move. Since
she was certain that he would forget that they had moved and where they had
moved to, she wrote down the new address on a piece of paper, and gave it to
him. Naturally, in the course of the day, an insight occurred to him. He
reached in his pocket, found a piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled
some notes, thought it over, decided there was a fallacy in his idea, and
threw the piece of paper away. At the end of the day he went home (to the old
address in Cambridge, of course). When he got there he realized that they had
moved, that he had no idea where they had moved to, and that the piece of
paper with the address was long gone. Fortunately inspiration struck. There
was a young girl on the street and he conceived the idea of asking her where
he had moved to, saying, "Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I'm Norbert Weiner
and we've just moved. Would you know where we've moved to?" To which the
young girl replied, "Yes, Daddy, Mommy thought you would forget."
The capper to the story is that I asked his daughter (the girl in the
story) about the truth of the story, many years later. She said that it
wasn't quite true -- that he never forgot who his children were! The rest of
it, however, was pretty close to what actually happened...
-- Richard Harter