Re: OS decisions

Brian Makin wrote:
>On Jun 13, 2009, at 5:35 PM, Shawn Betts wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Brian Makin<[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Some architecture questions... some of which may not have been  
>>> decided
>>> yet.
>>>
>>> Do we want to support 32 and 64 bit?
>>
>> I believe Frode was working on a 64bit port.
>>
>>> SMP?
>>
>> Sure, why not?
>>
>>> Will there be virtual memory?
>>
>> You sorta have to if you want to access all the computer's memory  
>> don't you?
>>

>More of a question of paging.  You could decide that ram sizes are  
>large enough that we don't need it...

I think you could leave this until it is needed.

>>> Memory protection?
>>
>> In many ways lisp doesn't need memory protection since you don't
>> create pointers out of thin air like in C. That said, it could be
>> useful for security purposes if movitz was a multiuser system.
>>

>Protection between user processes probably aren't as important.  In a  
>multiuser system you would still want projection between user and  
>kernel space however.

In my view the easiest way to get a multiuser system would be to make
Movitz run virtualized on top of Xen, you then just run one DomU per
user.

>> What kind of file system? or use an existing one?
>
> I think an existing one would be fine.

One option is to port LMFS from the MIT sources to Common Lisp.

Robert Swindells