On Tue, Jan 07, 2025 at 09:20:06AM -0800, Ron Minnich wrote:
>
> Why NIX?
>
> If you think about it, timesharing is designed for a world where cores
> are scarce. But on a machine with hundreds of cores, running Plan 9,
> there are < 100 processes. We can assign a core to each process, and
> let those processes own the core until they are done. This might be a
> useful simplification, it might not, but it's something.
>
> I did run some standard HPC benchmarks on NIX ACs and the results were
> good. I was always curious how it would work if we had those
> multi-hundred-core machines Intel and IBM and others were telling us
> about in 2011. Now that we have them, it would be interesting to try.
As said previously, I will start wandering and stumbling upon problems
this week-end---I'm a toddler in the area, so it's the way to learn to
walk.
But this brief summary highlight a solution and questions
that are, IMHO, valid questions: remember the "war" between
"micro-kernels" and "monolithic kernels"? In Unix, the kernel is not a
separate process (well: there are "administrative" processes,
scheduler and pager but...) but part of the applications. This is also
why it is efficient compared to "message passing" micro-kernels that
are not "near" enough the hardware---so inefficient that, for
ideologic purposes, some have rewritten "micro-kernels" in assembly to
improve the result...
But multiple cores (and even in the smaller machines nowadays, you
find two) present another mean of articulation of the OS code (the
MMU is central for me in the whole picture: not move the data
around, but change the view of the shared data per core). The question
is at least certainly worth asking.
--
Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/
http://kertex.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
------------------------------------------
9fans: 9fans
Permalink:
https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T7692a612f26c8ec5-M5aff003c96bbc12fe1554c0d
Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
