On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 07:41:33PM +0200, Andrew Holway wrote:
Of course, to be fair, there may have been a *reason* for not doing it that way before....
Between the early 1990's and early 2000's the price of a GB of memory went from ~$100,000 to ~$1000*. I guess a lot of the design decisions made for things like init were focussed on this. In 1995 is was common for server platforms to have 32Mb ram whereas the kernel alone in my PC here at home is consuming just over 500MB. It seems reasonable that software components built in 1997 will not be fit for purpose in 2017.
Just another historic note. Until System V, Release 4, circa 1989 or 90, AT&T's Unix ran on computers with a 64KB memory space. That was just the code though, the data, static, dynamic, and stack were in a second 64KB space. That was all the pdp-11 allowed.
The merger of BSD code with AT&T code in SVR4 pushed it off of the pdp-11s. But it still ran on things like the AT&T 3B-20 which had a 1MB virtual memory addressing scheme.
Jon