> > Sure, but this is merely a software question really.
>
> Once the software is in place, it behaves like hardware. Contrary to common
> myth, even though software is not hardwired into a machine, it is
> extraordinarily difficult to change, especially when loaded into hundreds of
> millions of machines around the world. If this were not the case, we would
> have all moved to IPv6 overnight when IPv4 near exhaustion.
>
> Not really. Individual applications must allocate virtual space in an
> intelligent and economical way as well, and usually they do not.
No. Applications get memory from the operating system kernel. Change
the kernel, and applications have access to more memory. All the
applications see is that when they ask for a new block of memory, they
get a base address which can be anywhere in the logical address space
used by the process but somewhere completely different in physical RAM
space. If applications allocate more memory than they need, that is
their problem, and a new architecture won't help. The kernel itself
has the capability to allocate memory in a very efficient way, and the
application doesn't even have to know about it.
I have written linux kernel code myself, I know how easy it is to
change things like this. The comparison with IPv4 doesn't make sense
because a kernel is private to a single computer only and can be
changed at any time without affecting other computers, but IPv6 would
require a major administrative effort of assigning new IP addresses
(and replacing all router/bridge/whatever hardware that can't deal
with it).
Andras
===========================================================================
Major Andras
e-mail: andras@users.sourceforge.net
www:
===========================================================================
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