[cap-talk] Styles of persistance

[Bill Frantz]

jed at nersc.gov (Jed Donnelley) on Thursday, April 3, 2008 wrote:

>Perhaps Bill can explain what makes the KeyKOS space bank unusual
>in this regard.  I'm afraid I don't know what a "space bank" is
>or how it is organized internally.  Is that relevant to this
>discussion?

Quite. A space bank[1] is the object that allocates and rescinds
all space in the system. (Think of it as the disk allocator for the
file system.) Since the system has orthogonal persistence, it is
running all the time, from when the system is first initialized to
when, hopefully many years later, it is abandoned. It runs through
checkpoints and restarts like all programs running in the system.

Since it is responsible for space allocation on a single system, I
don't think it makes much sense to serialize its state and move it
to another system.

Cheers - Bill

[1] <http://www.agorics.com/Library/KeyKos/Gnosis/62.html>

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