I have been playing around with RAMdisks and Windows for years. In certain very narrow applications, I have found them to be useful- and in a handful of cases, one of the best solutions.
I think that it's high time we got the option to run the entire operating system in RAM, in the form of suspending an entire system disk. With current DDR4 module sizes, and six and eight channel memory controllers in market, this makes a kind of sense.
It's not as if this cannot be done already- We are living in an age of hypervisors and virtual machines, so tricking out a box to do this is not really hard. The problem is, that the current design of windows pretty much hamstrings all of the reasons that
a person might want to do this.
The real reasons not to run windows in RAM are tied to all of the things in the kernel that are there to make relatively slow storage systems function faster. You really cannot easily turn off write caching, which would actually slow things down if you were
to run windows from a RAMdisk. There are a lot of other things like this that make a great case for running windows in this manner a bad idea, and I completely acknowledge all of that- running wondows from a RAMdisk = stupid.
Really, I just want to know if I am the only person that wishes there were a version of windows where the memory controller and storage systems were expressly designed with this in mind, from the ground up?
Think about that for a second.
There would be no loading from storage, ever. If every file on a system disk were already in memory, there would be no need to ever change the location of a single file. Therefore, loading anything into the CPU would be a lookup in a table to determine file
location only. There would be a lot of benefits to having the option to do things this way-
This would greatly reduce the complexity of the memory controller, for one. This would increase stability and decrease attack surface, enhancing security. Getting rid of the hard disk entirely would also decrease power consumption. Not to mention performance
improvements beyond what could be achieved in any other manner.
Now, it is true that you would need to load the system disk from a drive into memory on boot, and save it back to that drive on shutdown- and these are downsides- But if the machine could be entirely sans hard disk while running, the performance would be
amazing- it literally could not run faster.
Am I only guy that wants a version of windows designed to run this way? I would love to develop a workstation based on this concept, but doing so is not really possible without vendor support from MS. You can trick out a machine with various hacks to run
entirely out of RAM, but the current design does not run well at all this way- any advantages are minimal at best.
I would love to convince Microsoft to try this.
Regards,
Robert Scott
