On Sunday 10 February 2008 08:00, Tom Patton wrote:
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Technically, refreshing 4 gig of empty ram (as well as saving constant disk re-reads) WOULD be a green issue, but it was not intended to start a war. Rather, it illuminates a minor advantage of LINUX vs Windows. My apologies to the list...
The physical RAM subsystem (on the mainboard) doesn't know what memory contains "real" data what is "empty" and has no way of being told this disctinction. It refreshes all the cells periodically. Thus, this is not something which gives any advantage to one OS over another. Not, at least, for server, desktop or laptop systems. Perhaps some highly power-critical hardware such as portable audio players and cell phone have this ability, I don't know. Lastly, it seems that were the sort of selective RAM refresh you suggest then Linux would be at a power _disadvantage_ since it tries to keep as much of the RAM as possible filled with (potentially) useful data while Windows seems to try to free it up when possible.
Tom
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org