> On Jan 6, 2026, at 23:59, Ron Minnich <[email protected]> wrote: > > back in the NIX days, when we had 32GiB of memory mapped with 32 1-G > PTEs, I wrote a trivial venti that ONLY used dram. That was easy. > Because you can keep up a single machine with 32G up for an > arbitrarily long time, I did not bother with a disk. This work was > based on the fact that lsub had used very little of their 32G coraid > server (something like 3G? I forget) over ten years: venti dedups by > its nature and that's your friend. > > So maybe a pure-ram venti, with a TiB or so of memory, could work? > > "disks are the work of the devil" — jmk
I’ve been wondering why it’s still so rare to map persistent storage to memory addresses, in hardware. It seemed like Intel Optane was going to go there, for a while, then they just gave up on the idea. And core memory was already persistent, back in the day. I think universal memory should happen eventually; and to prepare for that, software design should go towards organizing data the same in memory as on storage: better packing rather than lots of randomness in the heap, and memory-aligned structures. Local file I/O might become mostly unnecessary, but could continue as an abstraction to organize things in memory, at the cost of having to keep writing I/O code. So if that’s where we are going, mmap is a good thing to have. But yeah, maybe it’s more hassle as an abstraction for network-attached storage. Wasn’t this sort of thing being done in the PDA era? I never developed for the Newton, but I think a “soup” is such a persistent structure. And maybe whatever smalltalk does with their sandboxes. Is it just a persistent heap or is it organized better? ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tf991997f4e7bb37e-Mbf113fadcd84d606d155d602 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
