Comment by antics | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antics | Hacker News Reader

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One of the things I like about this paper is the pristine, crystal-clear English it uses to describe things I thought I knew extremely well:

> Processes are the software analog of processors. They are the units of software modularity, service, failure and repair. The operating system kernel running in each processor provides multiple processes, each with a one gigabyte virtual address space. Processes in a processor may share memory, but for fault containment, and to allow processes to migrate to other processors for load balancing, sharing of data among processes is frowned upon. Rather, processes communicate via messages. They only share code segments.

"Processes are the software analog of processors." Yes of course. How easy it is to never ponder such a thing.

> "Processes are the software analog of processors." Yes of course.

Maybe this analogy worked in 1986 when hardware was a lot less reliable, but I don't think it goes very far these days: processes die all the time (normal termination, crash, get killed). When was the last time a processor or core died on you? In fact, according to this analogy most of us are running MS-DOS equivalent of systems since if your processor or core dies, your machine dies. And I don't see this changing any time soon.

I think the point they're making is that a process is a software abstraction that provides programmers the illusion of having a processor all to themselves. So in that sense the process is a software "analog" to the processor.

>When was the last time a processor or core died on you?

Almost every day. You may never experience if you only manage tens or hundreds of cores, but when you manage hundreds of thousands of cores, it happens.

I'm not sure if you're being serious, or delivering scathing sarcasm.

I am being serious. There is a lot of value in making complicated things trivially understandable. I think it's not an accident, for example, that many of the highest-cited academic papers in CS are survey papers.

Apologies from my cynical self & Poe's Law.

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