My Vintage Dream PC

[FatBytestard]

That prior posting should read :"Are you aware that..."

Bruce B. Reynolds, Trailing Edge Technologies, Glenside PA

YFHPFH (You Fixed His Post For Him)

 

[Scott Lurndal]

Exactly. And soon we'll have hundreds of CPU cores, or thousands
according to one Intel visionary.

So we have a choice: make things more complex (and less reliable) or
make things simpler (and more reliable.)

Votes?

John

Your suggestion of a nanokernel on one core controlling all other cores
doesn't scale and is far more complex and less reliable than even a
monolithic operating system. It is also untractable since the nanokernel
will need to execute _in the context of the core_ at times and must
also prevent whatever higher level software is running on that core from
adversly affecting the rest of the system (e.g. the higher level software
can't be allowed to program the local APIC (which is part of the core),
for example).

What you will see going forward is that the operating sytsem(s) never really touch
the real hardware anymore and a VMM of some sort manages and coordinates
the hardware resources amongst the "operating system(s)", while the
operating systems are blissfully unaware and run applications as they would
normally.

The VMM will be compact, it will be more tractable to prove close to correct
and will integrate with the platform TPM or TPM equivalent; but it will run
on all cores as ring -1.

scott

 

[FatBytestard]

IFF the monitor is well designed and written. If MS develops it the
corruption will be coming from the monitor.

Then YOU are the monitor that MS developed.

You wussified twerps are pretty disgusting.

Done any recent reading lately on modern OS vulnerabilities? You
know... like the current OSes in the channel and coming down the pipe,
or do you all just fucking make everything up as you go along?

 

[FatBytestard]

Oh, you know what? This rings a bell.
Now I can be frustrated, too!

Almost as bad as people that pronounce DATA as "Dhat-a" instead of
"DATE-a".

Or folks talking about CPUs that say "PRO-sessor", instead of
"prah-sessor", which is the correct pronunciation.

All quoted spellings were, of course, phonetic. Note that "prah"
is the "O" sound like when the doctor says "Say ahhhhh".

 

[TheQuickBrownFox]

Not really. The proportions of speed seem to remain the same.

But memory caches, buffers, etc. HAVE changed, and your analysis (and
training)is about three decades OLD, minimum.

Speed scales over time. The number of transistors that can be integrated
into a given die area scales over time.

We all already know that. Your reply is meaningless.

The paradigm by which we utilize the hardware can and has changed, and
will continue to change. You claiming it is all the same is a sad
hilarity.

Your mind set is what has stagnated.

Do you even know what current mode logic is, for example?

 

[TheQuickBrownFox]

That doesn't matter at all if the monitor is responsible for the
world power grid.

Have you seen ANY modern systems? Do you know how seldom bit errors
occur these days? Do you know what ECC can do? Do you know how seldom the
ECC area needs to be referred to on systems where it is utilized? We are
talking over periods of years!

When do we get to correct your errors? You were struck by several
cosmic rays. Errant data spews forth. When are you going to push your
reset button? You ARE the weakest link.

Mind sets like yours have stutter stepped man's advancement rate for
centuries!

 

[TheQuickBrownFox]

When talking about micro- or nano- kernels, the OS isn't just the
kernel. While a nanokernel won't (typically) be multithreaded, the full
OS would have not just multiple threads but multiple processes.

Any OS worth discussing today will be multithreaded.

Any OS that runs on the Cell BE CPU will be if it uses the whole CPU.

There are Cells in your futures...

 

[TheQuickBrownFox]

Multiple *processors*

John

Exactly. "multiple processes" on a single CPU is only one thread, in
the final analysis, even if it has little execution order functions, etc.
helping things out.

 

[TheQuickBrownFox]

kernal

What is it with you and this word's spelling, Klink?

 

[Richard Cranium]

Almost as bad as people that pronounce DATA as "Dhat-a" instead of
"DATE-a".

Or folks talking about CPUs that say "PRO-sessor", instead of
"prah-sessor", which is the correct pronunciation.

All quoted spellings were, of course, phonetic. Note that "prah"
is the "O" sound like when the doctor says "Say ahhhhh".

Like describing yourself Archie - "ahhhhh-sole"

 

[Charles Richmond]

[snip...] [snip...] [snip...]

Inside the OS there are usually a switcher, a scheduler, a process
manager, a file manager, an IO manager, and other basic parts.
Optional parts relate to hardware configuration and possibly dynamic
hardware configuration and temporary file systems.

Now how do UUOs and CALLIs relate to how the above mentioned
interfaces? (If at all)

My user mode code has some buffers I want to be written to the
disk. I do a series of UUOs and CALLIs to convey to the
monitor's file system handler, memory handler, device routines,
and controller device routines that I want my bits to be copied
from here to there and labelled XYZ. I ask the monitor what
date/time it thinks it is by doing a CALLI. I set up certain
rules about subsequent usage of the computer system by telling
the monitor through CALLIs and UUOs. These are the only
ways the monitor and I, the user, communicate.

How is that for a start?

/BAH

Translating the DEC'isms, UUO's and CALLI's are what is more generically
known as "system calls". IBM "big iron" would call them "Supervisor
Calls", but then that's IBM.

These calls provide system-wide information (like TIME and DATE), and
protect the OS and other users by *preventing* the normal user from
directly programming dangerous and potentially system-wide damaging code.

 

[Charles Richmond]

[snip...] [snip...] [snip...]

Simple: use one CPU out of 256 as the ultimate manager, and waste as
much of its cycles as you like. CPUs will soon be free.

So instead of carrying placards that say "FREE THE CHICAGO SEVEN",
we'll be carrying placards that say "FREE THE INTEL 256"??? ;-)

 

[Roland Hutchinson]

Nice unsubstantiated, peanut gallery mentality comment.

WHAT have you heard?

Mine runs fine. Vista has run fine for over three years, and W7 has
been running fine for several months now. You nay sayer retards are
idiots.

I love it how folks that have ZERO actual experience with things
expound on them like they actually know what is going on.

You do not.

Indeed, Windows 7 (of which you can download the final beta and run it for
free for the next year or so) is widely held to be, as advertised, the most
secure Microsoft operating system ever.

Just remember that damnation with faint praise is still damnation.

--
Roland Hutchinson

He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
.... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )

 

[Kim Enkovaara]

Sigh! Now consider that the core containing the OS has a cosmic ray
hit it.

No problem. If core in this context means memory for you, then ECC fill
fix that problem. Most of the mission critical computers use ECC memory.
You will just get report to a log that bit was flipped and was fixed.

If the core means one processor core, then the story is more difficult,
but usually caches are protected by ECC, datapaths have different forms
of protection. Also if cosmic ray hits regular control logic, the
propability for something bad happening is quite low (10% derating is
quite often used, because not all logic nodes are relevant for each
cycle).

If I remember correctly also the cosmic neutron/proton effects are not
as bad as the alpha radiation caused by the semiconductor itself and the
packages.

--Kim

 

[Christopher C. Stacy]

I do not know what you called the Silent 700 but the paper came with
a self destruct feature.

I still have a bunch of thermal terminal printouts from around 1974
that are holding up OK, despite not being very careful with them.
It's the ASR-33 teletype printouts from back then that are the most degraded.

 

[Peter Flass]

Pretty clear to me - what we unixy folks would call a syscall
interface.

SVC.

 

[Peter Flass]

Core kernel subprocesses can evolve where a dedicated core given to
that sub-process would be the prudent manner to handle it. Remember when
Bill said that 64kB was "enough"? There will come a day when the kernel
is so big, and has so many functions to manage, that in a multi core
world, the best solution would be a segmented kernel implementation.

Most OS's are threaded, but I don't think dedicating a core to a thread
would ever be a good idea, no matter what resources you have. The
reason the systems are threaded is because most of what they do is waiting.

Networking, for example, WITH security built into the kernel, would be
best handled on a locked, protected core that the main kernel is only
able to access. The kernel could become a manager of hardware between
other segments of that hardware, running their own little kernel segments
on their own CPUs. Not unlike JBOD paradigm. A JBOCores thing.

The Cell CPU does networking at near wire speeds. Usually such numbers
are not attainable due to various protocol overhead problems.

Networking is probably the exception.

8.5 out of 10 Gb/s is pretty damned good.

Hardware IP encryption and HAIPE and such is in your future, if you
have half a brain, and can see the bigger picture. The cell is easily
superscalar.

IBM is moving in this direction, with dedicated special-purpose
processors for special functions. Only time will tell, but I'm not sure
this is a good idea, except perhaps in marketing terms.

 

[Peter Flass]

You should probably learn to spell it if you are going to expound upon
it.

Maybe he's a Commodorian.

 

[Peter Flass]

What you will see going forward is that the operating sytsem(s) never really touch
the real hardware anymore and a VMM of some sort manages and coordinates
the hardware resources amongst the "operating system(s)", while the
operating systems are blissfully unaware and run applications as they would
normally.

We've seen this since CP-67 in, what, 1968?. BTDT.

 

[[email protected]]

You seem to be deluded by the belief that BAH will listen to reality.
Only those systems that were designed in the 60s to run on hardware of
the 60s are acceptable to her.

--L

Sign over _this_ door "Alt.Folklore.Computers"