Re: [9fans] threads vs forks

[William Josephson <jkw@eecs.harvard.edu>]

On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 07:00:26AM +0200, lucio@proxima.alt.za wrote:
> . A cache?  As quanstro pointed out, flash makes a wonderful WORM.
>   Now to get Fossil to work as originally intended, or a more suitable
>   design and implementation to take its place in this role and we have
>   a winner.

Sadly, if a WORM is your only application, then no one cares.
At least not enough to pony up for real peformance.  The folks
at places like Sandia are interested in running HPC applications
and there are a lot of people in other industries such as big oil
and finance that are willing to pay for performance for running
HPC applications, VMs which tend to have high I/O requirements when
an OS patch comes out, etc.

In the near term, the performance leaders in the flash market
ship a device driver plus hardware.  Much of the intelligence
actually resides in the device driver.  It is that secret sauce
that gets you good performance.  In theory it could be pushed
down, but it takes CPU, memory, and memory bandwidth that may
not be cost effective there.

 -WJ