Sharing RAM over the 'net (was Re: Process Migration on Linux - Impossible?)

Darren Reed (darrenr@cyber.com.au)
Fri, 3 Oct 1997 01:09:04 +1000 (EST)

In some mail I received from Fabio Olive Leite, sie wrote
>
> Hi there,
>
> On Thu, 2 Oct 1997, Darren Reed wrote:
> ) what about thread migration ? that could be an entire process or just a
> ) thread.
>
> Migrating a thread on a distributed memory environment is impossible,
> since they share everything but the stack. They just _have_ to be on the
> same computer, so that things happen the way they should.

So why can't you share the memory ?

Something pmap calling pmap on another box, over the network, and so on.

Of course this would be real slow over ethernet, but what about if you
have a host which has multiple cpu's with dedicated memory for each ?

I think in those sort of instances sharing memory over some sort of
"network interface" is an interesting idea and process/thread migration
could be very sexy. But perhaps Linux cannot support that without huge
rewrites ?