Re: "Write a memory contents file to whatever storage device you like [...] and restore it"
No, that's exactly what I said. Starting an application from disk requires initialization. You could take an image of it after initialization and store that, so next time you return to the program, it has an exact copy of its running memory state. You don't need optane to do that. All optane does is that, instead of copying from RAM to SSD, you worked in optane and left it there. There's a speed boost doing it that way, but it's not guaranteed to be useful.
In addition, unless you eliminated your RAM entirely and always worked from optane, you'd still have to occasionally copy the stuff from RAM over to it. Again, that's faster than copying down to disk, but is a necessary step if you want to freeze programs so they can be restored from persistent storage. Eliminating RAM would make a lot of things worse, and the article didn't suggest doing that, so your OS would end up looking very similar.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
