2008/5/27 Steve Richfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > William, > > This sounds like you should be announcing the analysis phase! Detailed > comments follow...
Design/research/analysis, call it what you will. > On 5/26/08, William Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> VRRM - Virtual Reinforcement Resource Managing Machine >> >> Overview >> >> This is a virtual machine designed to allow non-catastrophic >> unconstrained experimentation of programs in a system as close to the >> hardware as possible. > > > There have been some interesting real machines in the past, e.g. the > Burroughs 5000 and 6000 series computers that seldom crashed. When they did, > it was presumed to be either an OS or a hardware problem. At Remote > Time-Sharing we extended these in a virtual machine, to make a commercial > time-sharing system that NEVER EVER crashed after initial debugging. This > while servicing secondary schools in the Seattle Area with many hackers, > including a very young Bill Gates and Paul Allen. > > Systems now crash NOT because of the lack of some whiz-bang technology, but > because architectural development has been in a state of arrested > development for the last ~35 years. It is not just crashes that I worry about but memory corruption and other forms of subversion. >> >> This should allow the system to change as much >> as is possible and needed for the application under consideration. >> Currently the project expects to go to the operating system level >> (including experimentation on schedulers and device drivers). A >> separate sub-system supplies information on how well the experiment is >> going. The information is made affective by making it a form of >> credit periodically used to bid for computational system resources and >> to pass around between programs. > > > This sounds like a problem for real-time applications. In what sense? >> >> Expected deployment scenarios >> >> - Research and possible small scale applications on the following >> - Autonomous Self-managing robotics >> - A "Smart" operating system that customises itself to the users >> preferences without extensive knowledge on the users part >> >> Language - C > > > Whoops, there are SERIOUS limitations to what can be made reliable in C. C is purely the language for the VRRM, what the programs will be implemented inside the VM is completely up to the people that implement them. >> >> Progress >> >> Currently I am hacking/designing my own, but I am open to going to a >> standard machine emulator if that seems easy at any point. I expect to >> heavily re-factor. I am focussing on the architectural registers, >> memory space and memory protection first and will get on to the actual >> instruction set last. > > > This effort would most usefully be merged with the 10K architectures that I > have discussed on this forum. Merging disparate concerns might actually > result in a design that someone actually constructs. Possibly after I have completed the VRRM and tested it to see if it works how I think it works. But silicon implementation is not on the agenda at the moment. >> >> I'm also in parallel trying to design a high level language for this >> architecture so the internals initial programs can be cross-compiled >> for it more easily. > > > Does this require a new language, or just some cleverly-named subroutines? A different set of system calls in the least. Some indication of how important the memory is in dynamic memory creation is needed for example. >> Current Feature plans >> >> - Differentiation between transient and long term storage to avoid >> unwanted disk thrashing > > > Based on the obsolete concept of virtual memory rather than limitless RAM. We don't have limitless RAM, and I won't be implementing virtual memory. <snip because I don't have time> >> >> - Specialised Capability registers as well as floating point and integers > > > Have you seen my/our proposed improvements to IEEE-754 floating point, that > itself incorporates a capability register?! Perhaps we should look at a > common design? Do you mean capability in the same sense as me? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security Will Pearson ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
