The OS of the future

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I am fairly sure my thought is not original. However, I am looking for, or more accurately, hoping to see if I am not alone in my thinking. And....if the big OS developers (you all know who you are) are thinking along these lines. (Perhaps they already are and I am simply not aware of it because I am nowadays an application developer more than what used to be termed a systems developer.)

OK here it is. I am an old timer that cut my teeth programming in the 1980's.
The paradigm was we stored binary data on magnetic medium (floppy disk) and accessed the data serially and moved the "permanent" storage to RAM.

The transmission of data was serialized. One stream of bits that would be read from the disk into memory and the memory subsequently processed in parallel (8,16,32,64 bits,...) by the CPU.

Nowadays with the Solid State drive being used more and more, the need to access data through one serial stream is becoming obsolete.

A "Solid State Drive" simply is dedicated RAM. So why do we need to move data from one memory location to another and then have the CPU process the memory the data was moved to. (Of course neglecting consideration of the more responsive memory that is inside the CPU Cache)

With solid state data storage we should be able to have the CPU directly access the storage. Leading to a true multi threaded asynchronous data access now that we no longer need to access local data serially.

I am hoping to find that I am behind the curve most likely because I have not kept up with the changes in OS architecture and development.

Am I alone? Can someone please point me in a direction to discover that the next generation of OS's will/are doing multi threaded asynchronous reads of solid state data storage.

Thanks

What I have tried:

I have not attempted a search nor have an idea and where to start because this might be proprietary

Posted 21-Mar-17 5:00am

dishmann

Updated 22-Mar-17 2:38am

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F-ES Sitecore · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-21T05:11:00

Quote:
if the big OS developers (you all know who you are)

How did you find out I'm actually Bill gates?

Quote:
With solid state data storage we should be able to have the CPU directly access the storage.

Because RAM is much faster than even SSD and SSD is not very durable, it wears out with use so if you used it to the extent you use RAM the durability would suffer.

Jochen Arndt · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-21T05:38:00

This is more hardware than OS related. However, the OS must support new hardware features.

Disks are not like RAM because they use a different interface. What you are thinking about would require the "disk" to be connected like RAM. But RAM requires refreshing while solid state memory does not. So the classic memory interface is not practical.

You might search for "3D XPoint". That technology might be used as DRAM replacement in the future.

With solid state memory there is also another thing to observe:
Data is not stored continuously but at random locations to ensure that some cells are not written more often than others which would let them fail early. This is usually handled by software within SSD drives (but can be also done by file system drivers). When using a direct interface, this has to be handled by the CPU reducing the performance.

The OS of the future

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