Twizzler: An Operating System for Next-Generation Memory Hierarchies [pdf]

ssrc.ucsc.edu

49 pointsingve5 comments

Very cool.

I'm convinced access to persistent large addressable memory will fundamentally change the way we program.

Less optimistically, I imagine it's going to take a lot of time for this paradigm shift to happen. The idea of the cache hierarchy is a long held one and permeates both education and industry.

Didn’t the AS/400 (IBM iSeries today) pioneer this architecture with its single-level store?

Yes. AS/400's architecture is superficially very similar to this. All AS/400 resources are objects with a unique 128-bit ID that can be used directly as a pointer, for example. Actually, it goes even further back to the System/38 in the late 70s.

We're finally catching back up to 1978.

Yes, and many other things. Ahead of its time.

I very much doubt that there will be a fundamental change. The persistent memory is still not always-on RAM. For true reliable persistence one still needs carefully flush caches, ensure write barriers etc. This is something better done by libraries, which is not that different from programming today using API for a filesystem or DBMS.

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