I can't imagine a single Linux kernel instance or single program controlling that much bus-local RAM, but as you say there are other uses. One use I can imagin

I can't imagine a single Linux kernel instance or single program controlling that much bus-local RAM, but as you say there are other uses. One use I can imagine is massively distributed computing where pointers can refer to things that are either local or remote. These could even map onto IPv6 addresses where the least significant 64 bits are a local machine pointer and the most significant 64 bits are the machine's /64. Of course the security aspect would have to be handled at the transport layer or this would have to be done on a private network. The latter would be more common since this would probably be a supercomputer thing. Still... I wonder if this needs CPU support or just compiler support? Would you get that much more performance from having this in hardware? I do really like how Rust has u128 native in the language. This permits a lot of nice things including efficient implementation of some cryptography and math stuff. C has irregular support for uint128_t but it's not really a first class citizen.