The idea is as follows.
Design a hardisk controller that would take care of all harddrive and block
device managment and provide a virtual storage area to the OS. This way all
the kernel would have to worry about is a virtual harddrive and how to fech
and write data from and to it. Buffering, and read/write optimization would
be taken care of by the controller.
The controller would have a proccessing unit, its own memory, and a chip to
compress/decompress data.
The compression chip would filer all read and written data so that the
actual amount of data that is read and written to disk is compressed, this
way increasing disk space, and speed up disk read/writes.
The memory is a SDRAM DIMM that could be upgraded for more memmory, needed
if you would want to add more physical disks or just make room for mor disk
cache/ buffers.
The chip would take care of diskdriver issues, raid, buffering, and
diskplacement optimization. For instance it could make a note of what files
is usually read together and frequently, placing them close to eachother and
on the outer tracks of the hardrives if they are big, or more generally in
the middle of the used drivespace to optimize head movements...
>From the kernel side you would have a singel gigantic ultra fast hardrive,
and the disk drivers would be loaded inte the chip bios on installation
time. Further the buffering algorithms would also be loade inito the chip
bios on installation time to decrease the mainCPU time of kernel code.
I'm just a curious computer nerd, but tell me is it a good id?a?
/John Nilsson
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On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, John Nilsson wrote:
> The idea is as follows.
>
> Design a hardisk controller that would take care of all harddrive and block
> device managment and provide a virtual storage area to the OS. This way all
> the kernel would have to worry about is a virtual harddrive and how to fech
> and write data from and to it. Buffering, and read/write optimization would
> be taken care of by the controller.
>
> The controller would have a proccessing unit, its own memory, and a chip to
> compress/decompress data.
> The compression chip would filer all read and written data so that the
> actual amount of data that is read and written to disk is compressed, this
> way increasing disk space, and speed up disk read/writes.
> The memory is a SDRAM DIMM that could be upgraded for more memmory, needed
> if you would want to add more physical disks or just make room for mor disk
> cache/ buffers.
> The chip would take care of diskdriver issues, raid, buffering, and
> diskplacement optimization. For instance it could make a note of what files
> is usually read together and frequently, placing them close to eachother and
> on the outer tracks of the hardrives if they are big, or more generally in
> the middle of the used drivespace to optimize head movements...
>
> >From the kernel side you would have a singel gigantic ultra fast hardrive,
> and the disk drivers would be loaded inte the chip bios on installation
> time. Further the buffering algorithms would also be loade inito the chip
> bios on installation time to decrease the mainCPU time of kernel code.
>
>
> I'm just a curious computer nerd, but tell me is it a good id?a?
I don't think. The expensive RAM would not be efficiently used. OTOH, the
cheap HDD need not to be compressed, how would you recover the data? You
also mix in the filesystem layer (relocating files), it would be hardly
possible.
Tomas Telensky
>
> /John Nilsson
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