> I've stumbled across some mentions about this, but no real details. > What's this project about and what are the grand plans, if you're > allowed to disclose them?
VM2 is a project to redesign the Solaris virtual memory system around modern computer architectures. The core of the current VM system was designed in 1985-86, when Sun's large computers had 4 megabytes of RAM, one simple CPU with a simple MMU, very few disks, and no NUMA or power management. A couple decades of Moore's Law and many many billions of dollars of hardware development later, things look a bit different. Obviously the software has evolved to deal with these hardware changes, and it's a testament to the original design that it's performed for this long. But the VM system has developed a reputation for being hard to understand, as 20 years' of accreted development will tend to do, and having most of the VM interfaces operate on lists of small fixed-size pages has made it hard to do more significant innovation. We have a small team working on this project right now, and we've been focusing our limited time and energy on making sure that our core concepts are going to work as well as we expect. Once our ideas are more solidified and tested, we'll write up a more complete description. Blake _______________________________________________ perf-discuss mailing list perf-discuss@opensolaris.org
