So you just bought a brand new WM5 device. The box says it’s got 64M of RAM. You go digging through control panels on the device and find one that says it’s only got 50M. Is something wrong? Should you be worried about this? The short answers are “No” and “No.” This will explain why. UPDATE: On related news, ActiveSync 4.1 was released.
Windows Mobile 5: Where’s my RAM?
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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So a PDA can’t change the laws of physics and run without any RAM… good story. Isn’t is kind of obvious that the OS is going to use some of the available RAM to, y’know, run?
Yes, this is news, because since the release of WM5, many people were wondering of the wrong indication of RAM on their control panel. This blog entry EXPLAINS what’s going on.
The Windows Mobile 5 upgrade CD for my Axim X50 is on top of a desk right next to me… I just have to find the time to reinstall that plus reinstall all my apps and data.
When I buy a product I do like to know what is going on. Also XIP is very intresting technology that I hope PC can use if HDD are replaced with RAM or FLASH chips of sorts.
XIP would only work with memory-mapped I/O. x86 machines use a seperate address space for I/O devices (in general, VRAM is memory mapped for instance), so there is no way that the IP (instruction pointer) in the CPU could point at an I/O device. Maybe some XIP-like kludge could be put together using DMA, but it would still require that at least the part of the code being executed is loaded into main RAM.
Thanks for the reply. I took an Hour of reading before I understood your post <-;
Why not ? For example most modern graphic cards use memory mapped I/O. You can create virtual memory area, map it to physical device area and it will work – most modern PCI/AGP cards support it.
For example you write address of memory region to SiS900 NIC, so it uses data from there. For example driver reads that data when it sends/receives data.
If you create memory areas e.g. for NVidia card, you can access VGA config registers both through standard in/out and that memory region.
What’s the reason that EIP can be in such mmio area.
Edited 2005-11-19 22:18