> It's an unlikely hypothetical but imagine if fiber ran everywhere, > and all computers seamlessly worked together sharing computer power > as needed. Even

> It's an unlikely hypothetical but imagine if fiber ran everywhere, > and all computers seamlessly worked together sharing computer power > as needed. Even 256 bits wouldn't be out of the question then. You could do this today with 196 bits (128-bit IPv6 address, 64-bit local pointer). Take a look at RDMA, which could be summarized as "every computer's RAM might be any computer's RAM". The question is whether such an address makes sense for the Linux kernel. If your hyper-converged distributed program wants to call `read()`, does the pointer to the buffer really need to be able to identify any machine in the world? Maybe it's enough for the kernel to use 64-bit local pointers only, and have a different address mechanism for remote storage.