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Oblivious software person here: what does this new architecture mean for folks writing software on top of it? Is this a way to gain extra performance in single-
by akurilin 12y ago
Oblivious software person here: what does this new architecture mean for folks writing software on top of it? Is this a way to gain extra performance in single-threaded applications? What happens to concurrency? What's the long-term vision?
- auvrw 12y agofairly oblivious also, but here are some semi-informed guesses: > what does this new architecture mean for folks writing software on top of it? i think the plan is to use a custom compiler (made out of LLVM components) to build usual C to run within usual linux, except linux is on top of L4. > What's the long-term vision? rather than maximizing "compute per chip", maximize "compute per electricity." (and, presumably, cloud all the things.)
- Rusky 12y agoIIRC L4 is just a proof-of-concept thing to port, not necessarily what they plan for everyone to use. The Mill's security model is well-suited for a microkernel (it doesn't have the overhead traditional architectures have with microkernels). The security model is probably the biggest thing people writing software will notice- instead of a user/kernel split with expensive transitions between separate address spaces, it's a single address space with cheap (on the order of a shared library call) transitions between arbitrary protection domains (turfs).