Messages in this thread |  | | | Subject | Re: The ultimate TOE design | | From | Valdis.Kletnieks@vt ... | | Date | Thu, 16 Sep 2004 02:33:10 -0400 |
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On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:11:04 MDT, David Stevens said:
> Why don't we off-load filesystems to disks instead? Or a graphics > card that implements X ? :-) I'd rather have shared system resources-- > more flexible. :-)
All depends where in the "cycle of reincarnation" we are at the moment. Way back in 1964, IBM released this monster called System/360 - and one of the things it did was push a *lot* of the disk processing off on the channel and disk controller using a count-key-data format rather than the fixed-block that Linux uses. So out on the platters, the disk format would say things like "This is a 400 byte record, the first 56 of which is a search key". A lot of stuff, both userspace and OS, used things like 'Search Key Equal' and letting the disk do all the searching.
There was also this terminal beast called the 3270, which had a local controller for the terminals, and only interrupted the CPU on 'page send' type events.
Back then, the ideas made sense - it wasn't at all unreasonable for a single S/360-65 to drive 3,000+ concurrent terminals in an airline reservation system or similar (and we're talking about a box that had literally only half the hamsters of a VAX780).
But today, the 3270 isn't seen much anymore, and currently IBM emulates the CKD format on fixed-block systems for their z/Series boxes running z/OS or whatever MVS is called now.... [unhandled content-type:application/pgp-signature] |  |