> : With 30 people now on this list there must be someone else who wants
> : to say something ...
I've not actually seen anything from the list (should be going to ukuu)
> SMP vs cluster?
Why vs, why not AND. An SMP box is just a couple of well connected nodes.
> The hard one is sockets. I've never seen a good solution to that.
> I'll come back to that. First, I want to go through the other ones and
> offer suggestions.
There are several approaches to this. One is to treat it like a device so
you open a socket on a given machine and it like the device doesnt walk. The
other is to bend IP mobile to the needs. That would probably want something
like an old 486 as a network FEP.
> do remote processes. For the PID name space, make pid_t a 32 bit int,
> make the top 16 bits the host part, and the bottom 16 bits the pid part.
> (We need to come back to the host part when we discuss process migration.)
> A host part of "0" means "this host". So a "kill -HUP 1" will always
> restart init.
We can also do this for devices so you can mknod a printer on a different
node.
> Devices I sort of punt on. For device access, I would just use the
> remote mag tape protocol (or something very, very similar) so that all
> of the locking, etc., still works - since you ship all the requests to
> the system w/ the device, that kernel can implement the locks. Any
> issues here?
The vfs issues fairly controlled requests to the FS layer, and the device
layer also is fairly clean. The MOSIX project intercepted stuff at this
level --- so a remote device turns the request into a message. The system
also accounted messages so a process like a find would migrate across cpus
as it changed the disk it was searching.
> we have the talent right here on this list to do it. So I'll bow out of
> commenting on it, other than to say make sure mmap works right.
mmap is foul. SYS5 shared memory is just as bad too.
> Sockets. This is a hard problem. Some people think that a socket
> should stick around after the CPU that created the socket has crashed.
If you are having a single apparent IP address this is true for TCP, you can
on spotting a down host just send an RST and go into TIME_WAIT to preserve
the corruption protection properties of TCP.
> is a big performance win. Coming from a network cluster, you'll get that
> without having to work for it - the other way frequently is harder.
It also means more people can play
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