Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Tue, 19 Nov 96 10:13:05 PST | From | (Matthew Jacob) | Subject | Re: FYI: I2O Architecture (fwd) |
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>Looks horribly inefficient to me (as opposed to what they claim). I am >unconvinced that a "message-passing interface" to device driver/OS >interaction can provide "high-performance I/O systems." Why stick >what essentially amounts to another protocol stack sandwiched between >the hardware-specific points and the O/S layer? Eesh.
What might help here is hardware FIFOs between components, sorta like the Auspex hardware (which is also a message passing distributed OS).
> >The only slightly cool thing that could arise out of this would be a >truly heterogeneous multiprocessor; with a little extension, one machine >could call OS services on another machine via the protocol layer. This >might be desirable for distributed-memory systems except for the fact that one >bad kernel call could bring down all the machines in the cluster. >
Again, see the Auspex model. That is heterogenous processors in a distributed model (connected by a souped up VME backplane). Last I heard they finally did solve the 'one bad processor dragging down the system' problem.
A message passing distributed component system would be cool. I2O *could* offer a software framework. So could a lot of other frameworks.
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