A friendly tour of process memory on Linux

[ramon156]

I love these tiny explainers! Even if I already know what it's about, having a confirmation helps throughout reading.

[mhavelka77]

"mmap, without the fog"

I don't know if this is just me being paranoid, but every time I see a phrase like this in an article I feel like it's co-written by an LLM and it makes me mad...

[puika]

The article does feel like Gemini when you ask it to explain you something in layman terms, but co-authored by chatgpt with nonsense like "without the fog".

[drbig]

Instruction pipelining and this is exactly why I wish we still have the time to go back to "it is exactly as it is", think the 6502 or any architecture that does not pretend/map/table/proxy/ringaway anything.

That, but a hell lot of it with fast interconnect!

... one can always dream.

[ojbyrne]

The article is essentially describing virtual memory (with enhancements) which predates the 6502 by a decade or so.

[drbig]

The point is that we should acknowledged those "cheats" came with their reasons and that they did improve performance etc. But, they also did come with a cost (Meltdown, Spectre anyone?) and fundamentally introduced _complexities_, which at today's level of manufacturing and end of Moore's law may not be the best tradeoffs.

I'm just expressing the general sentiment of distaste for piling stuff upon stuff and holding it with a duct-tape, without ever stepping back and looking at what we have, or at least should have, learnt and where we are today in the technological stack.

[eru]

Do you want to throw out out-of-order-execution and pipelining while you are at it, too?

I'm semi-serious: there are actually modern processor designs that put this burden on the programmer (or rather their fancy compiler / code generator) in order to keep the silicon simple. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groq#Language_Processing_Unit

[taeric]

I'm curious how this dream is superior to where we are? Yes, things are more complex. But it isn't like this complexity didn't buy us anything. Quite the contrary.

[loeg]

But why?

[sleepytimetea]

Website blocked as a threat/unsafe domain.

[icedchai]

Are you on your work laptop? Your corporate IT "security theater" department may not recognize .xyz as a valid TLD.

[jeroenhd]

Sounds like your security software is broken. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/9e0c8d513f58a8053284b8145...

[drbig]

False alarm.

[offmycloud]

What browser blocked it?

[0xkato]

lol

[paulf38]

In what way are the error reports "just noise"?