On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 16:03 +0100, Enrico Weigelt wrote: > Hi folks, > > > after reading several articles about Mainframes and similar archs > (even ancient ones like B7000), I wonder if Linux world could > learn something from there. > > One very interesting point (IMHO) is the storage abstraction. > AFAIK, Mainframes work on one large virtual memory (disks for > swapping out RAM, tapes for swapping out disks, etc). > This way you just allocate some piece of space (like some virtual > partition) to an application (of guest). If you need more space, > just plug in more disks and the OS will handle all this automatically. > > I'm currently planning to implement an similar approach for Linux > (at least virtual block devices). > > What do you think about this ?
I am not certain this is the true for mainframes, at least not all of them. But interestingly enough the Unununium project had a similar philosophy, basically L1/2 cache, RAM, and disk were essentially the same things, though with different price/performance ratios, and that each should be indistinguishable for the user. Personally I don't think that level of abstraction provides any great benefit for the user, though from a strictly technical standpoint it is at least interesting. If you are speaking strictly of hot-pluggable memory/storage then Linux has this already (if the hardware supports it), and at least Xen gives a similar "mainframe" type feeling for allocating/deallocating storage/memory for guests on-the-fly. -a -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
