Shareable, networked, swap device?

[Barry Shein]

I have to admit it is an interesting idea. Policy needs to be designed
obviously, but in the end what you really want is a bibop (big bag o'
pages, name stolen from the lisp culture) shareable area, instead of
typed pages the "types" are host id's (perhaps IP addresses.)

Couldn't NFS *almost* do this right now. You'd create this big file
and the clients would keep their own seek pointers (allocated by the
server, but otherwise stateless since each request to pagein would
include the seek pointer and perhaps the page size, or maybe size is
fixed, seek pointer becomes a funny kind of file handle.)

Sounds like most of the work is on the client side (not unusual for
these types of things.)

So basically the operations are "store this page somewhere in file X",
which would return a magic cookie used later to get that page back.

Maybe a better name would be a "cloakroom swap discipline", you
check-in your page and get your ticket to retrieve it later.

There is still the whole pre-allocation problem (then again this might
be a nice opportunity to splice in some long-overdue subterfuges...)
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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