Re: Overclocked Celerons. [was:Re: seti@home]

Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Tue, 13 Jul 1999 01:49:24 -0700 (PDT)

James Rogers writes:

> Microsoft was trying to appeal to the PHB types who are easily impressed by
> the word "terabyte". Only a fool would try to run a large online database
> on a Microsoft OS, but I've seen numerous people try at places I've worked.
> The results have always been less than impressive.

What would be interesting is to move the (thoroughly debugged; RAID-capable; journalling) file system into the periperal storage unit itself. It can be based on some simple embedded OS, even no need to go multitasking -- to maximize simplicity. Perhaps even move most of it into hardware?

I think the chiefest reason against just putting objects into nonvolatile virtual memory vs. using file systems currently is instability. Horrible to lose a large database to a simple system crash. Of course with checkpointing (periodic total system state snapshots) and extremely stable software this might become less an issue.

It would be interesting to speculate if a simplified Linux could ever grow stable enough for this.