3 ms·

Object systems

by scroot 7y ago

Object systems

silversconfused 7y ago
Ok, but what does the level below that look like?
- scroot 7y ago
  I'm not sure there has to be a lower level at all, aside from asm and machine language
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Okay so you have a device driver that exposes your underlying hard disk as a single contiguous segment of blocks of a given size. You have objects which are blobs of heterogeneously sized arbitrary data with an addressing scheme. The software that marries these two things is basically a filesystem driver (in that you can implement filesystem semantics on top of it -- hell Ceph does it right now). Nothing about a modern Linux/BSD system really stands in the way of doing this.
    - scroot 7y ago
      Of course, you need some agent that can communicate with the hard disk and that knows how to manage memory. Maybe its one driver, maybe its several, but these can also just be objects. Live objects, I mean. Not just blobs of data, but actors that have behaviors and are always "running." You don't even need the concept of files or filesystems. And if you do, better left to a higher level
      - laughinghan 7y ago
        Isn't the whole point of persistent storage like hard drives to deal with the fact that computers shut off sometimes, and nothing can be "always 'running'"? Something below the object level (possibly part of the object system, possibly a layer below that) needs to read from disk and bootstrap all those agents/live objects/actors into existence.
        scroot 7y ago
        Well of course they aren't running when the computer is off. And yeah, you'd need something to bootstrap the system the same way you need a bootloader
        fragmede 7y ago
        The storage on disk doesn't have to be a traditional hierarchical filesyste,m for anything after the kernel is loaded (+drivers), as long as the kernel is able to recombobulate the agents off the block addressable storage device, it can store them however it wants. Simply serializing swaths of memory to/from disk may not be the most efficient, but that should show its possible.

Object systems

by scroot 7y ago

Object systems

silversconfused 7y ago

Ok, but what does the level below that look like?

scroot 7y ago
I'm not sure there has to be a lower level at all, aside from asm and machine language
- Spivak 7y ago
  Okay so you have a device driver that exposes your underlying hard disk as a single contiguous segment of blocks of a given size. You have objects which are blobs of heterogeneously sized arbitrary data with an addressing scheme. The software that marries these two things is basically a filesystem driver (in that you can implement filesystem semantics on top of it -- hell Ceph does it right now). Nothing about a modern Linux/BSD system really stands in the way of doing this.
  - scroot 7y ago
    Of course, you need some agent that can communicate with the hard disk and that knows how to manage memory. Maybe its one driver, maybe its several, but these can also just be objects. Live objects, I mean. Not just blobs of data, but actors that have behaviors and are always "running." You don't even need the concept of files or filesystems. And if you do, better left to a higher level
    - laughinghan 7y ago
      Isn't the whole point of persistent storage like hard drives to deal with the fact that computers shut off sometimes, and nothing can be "always 'running'"? Something below the object level (possibly part of the object system, possibly a layer below that) needs to read from disk and bootstrap all those agents/live objects/actors into existence.
      - scroot 7y ago
        Well of course they aren't running when the computer is off. And yeah, you'd need something to bootstrap the system the same way you need a bootloader
      - fragmede 7y ago
        The storage on disk doesn't have to be a traditional hierarchical filesyste,m for anything after the kernel is loaded (+drivers), as long as the kernel is able to recombobulate the agents off the block addressable storage device, it can store them however it wants. Simply serializing swaths of memory to/from disk may not be the most efficient, but that should show its possible.