Comment by Symmetry

2 years ago

What excites me most about RISC-V is the ability to potentially experiment at a systems level. I love the Mill project and they have a ton of interesting and clever ideas but they're trying to innovate along so many dimensions at once that I feel like it's almost a forgone conclusion that they'll fail. What I'd really like is for someone to design a chip with their ideas about backless memory and putting address translation at cache/memory border and do a RISC-V implementation of that. Then you could try getting a working OS with that up, and then maybe incrementally try out other ideas rather than just trying to change the world all at once.

We've had this paradigm about how memory and permission and OS resource management works that we've have since the PDP-11 and I think we ought to be looking at how to move beyond that.