Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Single Address Space Operating System

c2.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 53 posts

Re: Single Address Space Operating System

#11

Post by com2kid »

A 128bit address space would be fun. Of course as the page mentions, if you want to use IPv6 for this, you actually want something more like a 196bit address space or just round it up to a 256bit address space.

Imagine all the world's computers running in a single unified address space. All network access is abstracted away, loading a resource is as simple as loading a memory address.

It would be like a new golden era for C! Rather than using URIs or some sort of XML addressing schema or whatever else people decide to invent, instead, all the world's information and knowledge from all around the world (solar system, universe?) is available through one unified address space.

Although I imagine we'd still need some sort of DNS system running on top. ;)

Re: Single Address Space Operating System

#13

Post by wmf »

com2kid wrote: post #11

A 128bit address space would be fun. Of course as the page mentions, if you want to use IPv6 for this, you actually want something more like a 196bit address space or just round it up to a 256bit address space. Imagine all the world's computers running in a single unified address space. All network access is abstracted away, loading a resource is as simple as loading a memory address. It would be like a new golden er…

Imagine all the world's computers running in a single unified address space. All network access is abstracted away, loading a resource is as simple as loading a memory address.

The standard rebuttal to this thinking is Waldo et al. "A Note on Distributed Computing" from 1994. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.41.7...

"We argue that objects that interact in a distributed system need to be dealt with in ways that are intrinsically different from objects that interact in a single address space. These differences are required because distributed systems require that the programmer be aware of latency, have a different model of memory access, and take into account issues of concurrency and partial failure."

Re: Single Address Space Operating System

#15

Post by SoftwareMaven »

wmf wrote: post #13
com2kid wrote: post #11

A 128bit address space would be fun. Of course as the page mentions, if you want to use IPv6 for this, you actually want something more like a 196bit address space or just round it up to a 256bit address space. Imagine all the world's computers running in a single unified address space. All network access is abstracted away, loading a resource is as simple as loading a memory address. It would be like a new golden er…

Imagine all the world's computers running in a single unified address space. All network access is abstracted away, loading a resource is as simple as loading a memory address. The standard rebuttal to this thinking is Waldo et al. "A Note on Distributed Computing" from 1994. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.41.7... "We argue that objects that interact in a distributed system need to be dealt w…

In nearly 20 years of building distributed systems, this has held true every. single. time. Trying to abstract away the distributed nature of a system inevitably leads to pain and sorrow. I think having explicit knowledge about what is local and what is remote is critical, but having a single, universal address space, so any application can reference any resource, anywhere, when it logically needs to, would be great. They are just different things.

Re: Single Address Space Operating System

#17

Post by danellis »

com2kid wrote: post #11

A 128bit address space would be fun. Of course as the page mentions, if you want to use IPv6 for this, you actually want something more like a 196bit address space or just round it up to a 256bit address space. Imagine all the world's computers running in a single unified address space. All network access is abstracted away, loading a resource is as simple as loading a memory address. It would be like a new golden er…

> All network access is abstracted away

Which is a BAD thing, because it's one hell of a leaky abstraction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...

Re: Single Address Space Operating System

#18

Post by jevinskie »

Osmium wrote: post #4
ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

Jeff Chase ( http://www.cs.duke.edu/~chase/ ) was one of the authors on the 'Architectural Support for Single Address Operating Systems' paper in '92. I read that when I was at Sun and thought it was pretty amazing. It shaped a lot of my thinking about what the world would look like when we got to ubiquitous 64 bit address spaces. That change is coming. You can statically link to addresses in that world. It makes for…

Do you have any insight for what the security implications would be (if any) for an OS like this?

You could use something like Native Client to run multiple protected "processes" in a single address space.

Re: Single Address Space Operating System

#19

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

wmf wrote: post #13
com2kid wrote: post #11

A 128bit address space would be fun. Of course as the page mentions, if you want to use IPv6 for this, you actually want something more like a 196bit address space or just round it up to a 256bit address space. Imagine all the world's computers running in a single unified address space. All network access is abstracted away, loading a resource is as simple as loading a memory address. It would be like a new golden er…

Imagine all the world's computers running in a single unified address space. All network access is abstracted away, loading a resource is as simple as loading a memory address. The standard rebuttal to this thinking is Waldo et al. "A Note on Distributed Computing" from 1994. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.41.7... "We argue that objects that interact in a distributed system need to be dealt w…

I'd argue that at this point one has to be aware of latency and concurrency on the local system also, and any programming model ignores this at their peril.

It's the greatness of the potential of failure/hang on all actions that separates local RAM access from distributed computing. You don't generally need to worry about your app hanging indefinitely because of a memory read.

Re: Single Address Space Operating System

#20

Post by Shivetya »

As shown in the article the system i from IBM (aka AS/400) is an example of this architecture. Originally 48bit it moved to 64bit when the RISC (power) processors came to the forefront. Yet that memory model is only element to the longevity and flexibility of the platform.

However their best trick was keeping the machine code and OS so separate than when migrating to RISC from CISC you didn't even need the source code for the majority of code running on the system to migrate.

Post reply on HN