Do we really need swap on modern systems?

Re:Do we really need swap on modern systems? by rogerbinns on Thursday February 23, 2017 @12:52PM (#13715969)

The AS/400 (or whatever they call it now) had an approach like that. Everything was on disk and RAM was just a cache of disk. That also meant every "object" had an address and could be accessed by any process with suitable permissions. There are lots of other things they do, with a very different approach than Unix, Windows etc.

Frank Soltis' book is recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1882419669/

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Re:Do we really need swap on modern systems? by PeCaN on Thursday February 23, 2017 @02:30PM (#13716926)

AS/400 is really an amazing system, in many ways still ahead of its time. Persistent, single-level storage and capability security are ideas that still have yet to catch on in the mainstream—even though more research gets poured into NVRAM every year.

It's a shame hardly anyone knows about it. Those things are a joy to use. You can get a free (limited, but still useful) AS/400 user account to play around with at http://pub400.com/. I really recommend it.

(Disclaimer: I'm slowly working on a system that resembles AS/400 in many ways, but optimized for analyzing and reporting on very large timeseries databases. It's intended for business applications that require a combination of scheduled reports and fast ad hoc analysis of big timeseries data, initially the oil & gas industry (which is where I work in my “real job”).)

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