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Hi, I was wondering if there was driver/support for Intel Turbo Memory in the Linux kernel, or upcoming kernel release? I am asking because I'm purchasing a new laptop, and I am an Ubuntu user so I would like to use that as swap space. Will I see the benefit of turbo memory in linux or is it not supported right now?
If it IS viewed as a hard-drive does Linux write to it properly? Because I know if you write constantly to the same location on a solid state drive it becomes corrupted and damaged...
The drives themselves do wear leveling any more, so there's no danger of that. You can write to a flash drive more than a hard drive any more. You shouldn't need to worry about even using flash as a swap drive (which is what Windows basically does with it)
The only OS that can use Intel Turbo Memory (ITM) right now, is Vista. However if you Google around you will see that many Vista users aren't even using it because it doesn't provide the
benefitsadvertised, or is
buggy.
Neither previous Windows users like XP, nor Linux users, can use this ITM, and it doesn't look like there are any efforts to develop support for it under Linux. I have it in my laptops because I couldn't buy them without it, (I knew I wouldn't use Vista ever so it presents zero value to me). It's not even visible under linux, as anything, and I've never read anywhere that a linux user has been able to access the memory. The most you can see is the Intel ITM controller by doing an lspci;
These guys are supposed to add support for it to their software for XP users eventually, but it
doesn't look like they've got it in their product yet. The problems that Vista users are having with ITM, aren't helping the effort for more support under other OSes. Add to that the fact that Sony and HP decided to wait to implement it, and it looks like this may turn out to be a nice idea, but something that provides little
practical value in its first release.
My advice is don't consider the technology useful, at least the 1.0 release of it. If you can order your laptop without it and save a few bucks, do it. If you can't, it's going to come with it, but it's probably not going to be worth the effort to try and take advantage of it.
I've adjusted my linux to spin down the harddrive as fast as possible. Around with some other adjustments, my laptops harddrive is powered down as long as I don't start any new applications or do "sync".
As my harddrive consumes about 5 Watt spinning up and 2 Watt idle it would be really good to have this ITM as secondary harddrive where all the frequently used programs are stored. So I could avoid this energy draining harddrive activity.
Another option wold be to use an usbstick as secondary harddrive, but the obvious disatvantage is that this stick wouldn't be inside the laptop.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
