

Russian rides Phantom to OS immortality - twampss
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/03/phantom_russian_os/

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andr
IIRC several years ago the Linux virtual memory manager started to
optimistically write pages to swap when it was idle. If the VMM is tuned to do
this more aggressively, and not to invalidate the page file on reboot, you get
the benefits of Phantom without the whole hassle of writing a new OS.

~~~
cchooper
Unfortunately not, because

a) the memory manager cannot guarantee a consistent system state in the swap
file

b) the kernel has no way of instantiating its own state from an image

These are hard problems, which is why the people working on them usually start
from scratch: <http://www.eros-os.org/eros.html>

------
rjprins
So basically, virtual memory and the filesystem become one and the same thing?

Very interesting concept, especially if you combine it with the soon-to-be-
ubiquitous solid state drives.

But what happens when your system crashes? And the last state was the one that
caused the crash...

