From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Sat, 7 Mar 2009 00:08:56 -0500 From: William Josephson To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Message-ID: <20090307050856.GB65138@mero.morphisms.net> References: <20090307030128.GA64231@mero.morphisms.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.3i Subject: Re: [9fans] threads vs forks Topicbox-Message-UUID: b5583d82-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 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