[TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

[Dan Cross]

On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 9:09 PM, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:

> On 1/3/2018 6:40 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>
>> It's the 21st century, except for big data centers at Google,
>> Facebook, Microsoft, et. al, who uses disk drives in this day and
>> age?
>>
> Have you actually priced "Enterprise" level SSD's lately that come with a
> support contract so that when they hit their end of life, the VAR will
> replace them?
>
> Dell 400GB SLC (Hitachi) in a Compellent, $5K, and that's with an
> educational discount a couple of years ago.
>
> Sure, if you're doing an IOPS/$ comparison, they shine. But for the most
> part, a Compellent with a few SLC SSDs, and a few MLC SSDs, still needs
> spinning rust to make the bulk of the storage.
>
> And this is a tiny 70TB installation mostly for VMware and Oracle DB.
>

Well sure, but I think this sort of reinforced Ted's point: you're not
going to run Fuschia on that machine. The machine you are describing is,
conceptually, more in the camp of the things you'd find in a big company's
datacenter rather than in an end-user's cell phone or laptop.

One of the issues with Unix/Linux-style kernels is that they try to be
"general-purpose": suitable for any number of tasks. A new direction in
systems is the realization that the software we run in datacenters doesn't
need to be the same as the software we run on our desktop machines. The big
iron in the rack doesn't necessarily need a graphics subsystem or USB
drivers for keyboards, mice, or other data-entry things, for instance; it
certainly doesn't need X11, GNOME, and on-and-on.

Fuschia's approach is the dual of this: the kernel to drive the cell phone
doesn't need datacenter-class storage support or 10Gbps networking.

        - Dan C.
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