On Thu, Jun 8, 2023 at 11:02 AM Hannu Krosing <han...@google.com> wrote: > No, I meant that this needs to be fixed at OS level, by being able to > use the same mapping. > > We should not shy away from asking the OS people for adding the useful > features still missing. > > It was mentioned in the Unconference Kernel Hacker AMA talk and said > kernel hacker works for Oracle, andf they also seemed to be needing > this :)
Fair enough, but we aspire to work on a bunch of different operating systems. To make use of an OS facility, we need something that works on at least Linux, Windows, macOS, and a few different BSD flavors. It's not as if when the PostgreSQL project asks for a new operating system facility everyone springs into action to provide it immediately. And even if they did, and even if they all released an implementation of whatever we requested next year, it would still be at least five, more realistically ten, years before systems with those facilities were ubiquitous. And unless we have truly obscene amounts of clout in the OS community, it's likely that all of those different operating systems would implement different things to meet the stated need, and then we'd have to have a complex bunch of platform-dependent code in order to keep working on all of those systems. To me, this is a road to nowhere. I have no problem at all with us expressing our needs to the OS community, but realistically, any PostgreSQL feature that depends on an OS feature less than twenty years old is going to have to be optional, which means that if we want to do anything about sharing address space mappings in the next few years, it's going to need to be based on threads. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
