Re: VMM

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Sun, Oct 13, 2002 at 07:00:10PM +0200, Farid Hajji wrote:
> The "magic" of VM really lives in the VM module/task/phys-server/...
> which resolves the conflicts by determining which pages are more
> recently used, etc. No single client can do this, because it simply
> doesn't see the "big picture". It all boils do to this: You partition
> the memory space into sub-spaces that would be individually managed
> and locally optimzied, but you won't get global optimization here.

I am stretching my neck out very far here, but I want to add a more generic
and abstract point of view here.  A German newspaper had a project running
before election, where you could invest into shares of the political
parties.  After the election, you would get a percentage of the total money
on the market according to the result in the election (eg, if the shares for
Green party where traded at 8.3 EUR, and the result for the Green party would be
8.5%, it would be to your advantage to buy shares).

The results were pretty good.  Despite the total mess of this year's
election, the general trends and approximate percentages where predicted
correctly by the market.  The results had been even better in earlier
projects like this.

The theory behind this is that prices in an economic market represent
distributed information.  Although no single shareholder knows the result of
the election, but only their own estimation of the global outcome, it is
possible to predict the global outcome based on the individual distributed
information, represented by the price of the shares.

If the theory is correct (under which conditions?), then it mightbe feasible
to have a distributed VM system with an economic market model.  There could
be a price for pages, and the price might change depending on the demand.
Of course, thinking this through requires a lot of more work.  But it is an
interesting idea nevertheless, I think.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    address@hidden
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
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http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/