David Brown wrote:
With a 64-bit architecture, just memory mapping the harddrive can be an
excellent way to implement a filesystem.
That seems true but desktop processors tend not to actually be able to
manage the full 2^64 virtual address space, and at the same time they
tend to have large drives attached to them. While right now all is well,
I could see where we could encounter problems at some point that are
similar to the ones we have encountered at the end of the 2^32 era.
Another problem, of course, is the issue of programs that need the
virtual address space for other things, although if I remember the Mach
driver model the driver gets its own address space, so that may be a
non-issue. Finally, one should not ignore the overhead of managing all
those page tables....
I dunnoh. I don't think it is as clear cut a bad idea as others have
implied, but it is not without its shortcomings.
--Chris
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