Re: [RFC] VM: I have a dream...

[Avi Kivity <avi@argo.co.il>]

Al Boldi wrote:

>A long time ago, when i was a kid, I had dream. It went like this:
>
>I am waking up in the twenty-first century and start my computer.
>After completing the boot sequence, I start top to find that my memory is 
>equal to total disk-capacity.  What's more, there is no more swap.
>Apps are executed inplace, as if already loaded.
>Physical RAM is used to cache slower storage RAM, much the same as the CPU 
>cache RAM caches slower physical RAM.
>
>  
>
I'm sure you can find a 4GB disk on ebay.

>When I woke up, I was really looking forward for the new century.
>
>Sadly, the current way of dealing with memory can at best only be described 
>as schizophrenic.  Again the reason being, that we are still running in the 
>last-century mode.
>
>Wouldn't it be nice to take advantage of todays 64bit archs and TB drives, 
>and run a more modern way of life w/o this memory/storage split personality?
>  
>
Perhaps you'd be interested in single-level store architectures, where 
no distinction is made between memory and storage. IBM uses it in one 
(or maybe more) of their systems. A particularly interesting example is 
http://www.eros-os.org.

-- 
Do not meddle in the internals of kernels, for they are subtle and quick to panic.