Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!world!bzs From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals Subject: Re: Shareable, networked, swap device? Message-ID: Date: 27 Oct 90 20:11:43 GMT References: <144274@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Sender: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Organization: The World Lines: 28 In-Reply-To: lm@slovax.Sun.COM's message of 26 Oct 90 20:33:37 GMT I have to admit it is an interesting idea. Policy needs to be designed obviously, but in the end what you really want is a bibop (big bag o' pages, name stolen from the lisp culture) shareable area, instead of typed pages the "types" are host id's (perhaps IP addresses.) Couldn't NFS *almost* do this right now. You'd create this big file and the clients would keep their own seek pointers (allocated by the server, but otherwise stateless since each request to pagein would include the seek pointer and perhaps the page size, or maybe size is fixed, seek pointer becomes a funny kind of file handle.) Sounds like most of the work is on the client side (not unusual for these types of things.) So basically the operations are "store this page somewhere in file X", which would return a magic cookie used later to get that page back. Maybe a better name would be a "cloakroom swap discipline", you check-in your page and get your ticket to retrieve it later. There is still the whole pre-allocation problem (then again this might be a nice opportunity to splice in some long-overdue subterfuges...) -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | {xylogics,uunet}!world!bzs | bzs@world.std.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD