4 ms·

You'd probably still have memory partitioned into persistent areas and runtime heap of a sort, and you might very well continue to use the file system metaphor

by markbnj 12y ago

You'd probably still have memory partitioned into persistent areas and runtime heap of a sort, and you might very well continue to use the file system metaphor because it still makes sense to humans. Whether a file is bits on magnetic disk, in flash memory, or fast persistent RAM isn't all that meaningful to the user. As for sharing, I don't see why this would be an issue. If you have to move memory contents between machines then you still need some sort of external transport, whether it is a network, or a glowing glass cube.

hderms 12y ago
Took the words right out of my mouth (better said, of course).
sp332 12y ago
Filesystem semantics are a bottleneck. Fusion IO had to get rid of them when they demoed their billion-IOPS platform last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711 For communicating data between programs, would you create a filesystem object that points to memory inside your program, or what?
- DelwinAmber 12y ago
  Yes. On Linux it's /dev/shm and it is a ramdisk that you can access from multiple processes. IPC (Inter-Process Communication) is a known technology. This won't change it much if at all.
- colanderman 12y ago
  That doesn't make any sense. Create a file, memory-map it, bam, you have RAM performance with "filesystem semantics". (There is NO overhead associated with memory-mapping a file on a ramdisk in the Linux kernel.) Probably what they're referring to is something more along the lines of replacing SCSI or NFS with a protocol that is a better match for the random access patterns used to access in-memory structures. (Hence their 64-byte I/O size; that is equal to a cache line on Intel architectures.)
  - sp332 12y ago
    Hm, how would this memristor stuff connect to the system? Will it look like a memory controller or more like PCI-e flash?
    - wmf 12y ago
      It sounds like HP is pitching it as memory.
melloclello 12y ago
Continuing to use the file-system metaphor (Instead of, I don't know, anything else, perhaps some kind of global namespace with built-in versioning like Urbit's) seems like lobotomising this incredible new paradigm before it is even born.
- markbnj 12y ago
  It might be. I'm not arguing that it is the ultimate best metaphor to use, but these things do tend to be adopted organically and become very entrenched.

by markbnj 12y ago

hderms 12y ago

Took the words right out of my mouth (better said, of course).

sp332 12y ago

Filesystem semantics are a bottleneck. Fusion IO had to get rid of them when they demoed their billion-IOPS platform last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711 For communicating data between programs, would you create a filesystem object that points to memory inside your program, or what?

DelwinAmber 12y ago
Yes. On Linux it's /dev/shm and it is a ramdisk that you can access from multiple processes. IPC (Inter-Process Communication) is a known technology. This won't change it much if at all.
colanderman 12y ago
That doesn't make any sense. Create a file, memory-map it, bam, you have RAM performance with "filesystem semantics". (There is NO overhead associated with memory-mapping a file on a ramdisk in the Linux kernel.) Probably what they're referring to is something more along the lines of replacing SCSI or NFS with a protocol that is a better match for the random access patterns used to access in-memory structures. (Hence their 64-byte I/O size; that is equal to a cache line on Intel architectures.)
- sp332 12y ago
  Hm, how would this memristor stuff connect to the system? Will it look like a memory controller or more like PCI-e flash?
  - wmf 12y ago
    It sounds like HP is pitching it as memory.

melloclello 12y ago

Continuing to use the file-system metaphor (Instead of, I don't know, anything else, perhaps some kind of global namespace with built-in versioning like Urbit's) seems like lobotomising this incredible new paradigm before it is even born.

markbnj 12y ago
It might be. I'm not arguing that it is the ultimate best metaphor to use, but these things do tend to be adopted organically and become very entrenched.