[TUHS] ATC/OSDI'21 joint keynote: It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware (Timothy Roscoe)

[Warner Losh]

On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 4:00 PM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm curious about other peoples' thoughts on the talk and the overall
> topic?
>

My comment is that the mental map that he presents has always been a lie.
At least it's been a lie from a very early time.

Even in Unibus/Qbus days, the add-in cards had some kind of processor
on it from an early time. Several of the VAX boards had 68000 or similar
CPUs that managed memory. Even the simpler MFM boards had buffer
memory that needed to be managed before the DMA/PIO pulled it out
of the card. There's always been an element of different address spaces
with different degrees of visibility into those address spaces.

What has changed is all of these things are now on the SoC die so
you have good visibility (well, as good as the docs) into these things.
The number of different things has increased, and the for cross domain
knowledge has increased.

The simplistic world view was even inaccurate at the start....

Warner
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