PCI NVRAM card for Linux?

Daniel Quinlan (quinlan@transmeta.com)
Wed, 24 Mar 1999 17:37:21 -0800


I'm in the process of looking for a PCI NVRAM card that could be used
with Linux, and I haven't been very successful thus far. The only
company I've found with such a card is unwilling to sell it except to
their primary customer.

There are an entire range of applications for which such a card could
be used in Linux: filesystem logging, fast NFS write acks, kernel
debugging (logging to memory instead of disk), block devices, etc.
I'm aware that some of the more recent RAID controllers include NVRAM
for faster writes, but they doesn't provide the same flexibility as a
general-purpose NVRAM card (and they are really expensive: one or two
thousand dollars).

For this task, flash memory is not an option, since it is only
designed for a relatively small number of writes, and it is slow.
What you probably want is either battery-backed SDRAM or SRAM. 64MB
is a good amount, but I'd settle for less (especially if a version
providing more NVRAM was forthcoming).

So, is anyone aware of such a card available on the general market?

Dan

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