David Brown wrote:
However, memmory mapping the disk drive isn't as far-fetched or bad of an idea as it might sound. Linux essentially does this already, although in a complicated manner because of the address space limit.
I agree. Memory mapping the whole drive makes a lot of things easier. It also makes it possible to checkpoint the state of the system. It makes fully functional operating systems like NixOS (purely functional OS) and CoyotOS (secure, micro-kernel based OS) easier. In fact Coyotos itself does memory map the whole disk. And with SSD storage replacing spinning disks in the near future ( http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9088158 ) doing away with filesystems as we know them and implementing the whole thing like in-memory storage might make even more sense.
With a 64-bit architecture, just memory mapping the harddrive can be an excellent way to implement a filesystem.
This is one of the reasons I have been an advocate of 64 bit systems these past few years: Not because it is faster but because it removes certain scaling problems with respect to memory address spaces. This helps with virtualization right now and will soon help with memory mapping all of your storage.
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