|
|
|
|
|
|
by capitalsigma
3740 days ago
|
|
|
I'm not sure his idea about "merging memory and storage" really makes sense. He says that he wants load instructions to be able to hit the disk in order to avoid "calls to input/output routines in the operating system." But you can't avoid the input/output routines --- he's effectively saying that we should hardcode our filesystems into a single machine instruction and let the processor figure it out. If anything, we're moving farther from this model, since VMs give us virtual address spaces inside virtual address spaces. I don't think this is just a security issue; it really breaks all of the assumptions that we like to make in modern programming languages. |
|
|
I think he was rather saying that the OS could do it: persistent virtual memory as the primary abstraction. In Unix, files and processes are different kinds of things; in KeyKOS there were only processes; RAM was effectively a cache. As Unix directories have links to files, KeyKOS processes could be given capabilities to invoke other processes (passing capabilities and data as arguments). The different security model makes this analogy misleading, but you can see how you could emulate a filesystem.
What assumptions do you mean?