Re: ADA os talk

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Allright - if you say so. :-)

Quite honestly, you are now outside my circle of experience & buzzwords.
NUMA is a dangling pointer. So I guess I'll just agree and look smart by
association. :-)

IMHO, a basic Ada kernel is most likely to end up running on a single
processor, but why build in that limitation? IIRC, early versions of WinNT
Workstation would support up to 4 processors - don't know what it does now.
Why not 65536 processors? You'd not likely get there - discovering that the
overhead bogs things down at some point, but why build in that limitation?
While we're at it, why not make it a distributed kernel so it could be run
in a box with, say, 4 processor cards each with their own memory and with
shared memory & communication channels between them? Designs for such OS's
exist & it would seem to be a good thing to adapt that capability into an
Ada OS. It ought to scale with the app, or is it impossible? (Sort of: "If
you've got one processor/memory compile/boot this way. If you've got N
processors/memories, compile/boot this way...")

Maybe the best strategy would be to identify someone's OS college text as
the starting point. If they describe some set of OS's in sufficient detail,
it would be a matter of saying "We need to implement chapters 3, 7 and 12 of
this text." The basic requirements would thus be done and a good part of the
design work is right there. Any suggested books?

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@SpamCop.net> wrote in message
news:bco+FIJl84O8@eisner.encompasserve.org...
>
> For large values of N, then, that should include NUMA support.
> This is _not_ just a matter of page tables, but must include
> special NUMA logic for spinlocks to assure fairness.