Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture Security Reply To: Security

Ivan Godard
Keymaster
Post count: 689

There is considerable member-dependent variation possible in the formats of these things, and there are probably variations that we haven’t thought of yet that will be used some day. Consequently you should see this answer as representative rather than graven.

ID sizes (turf, task) are member dependent. The most important constraint on their sizes is that the product of a task and a turf is used as the implicit address to locate the root stacklet in a portal call, and hence must fit together in a virtual address (60 bits) together with a stacklet size and enough bits for non-stacklet memory as well. All these bit fields are per-member fixed, and the member designer can increase one only by shrinking another. A representative number might be 23 bits each for turf and task ids.

We don’t seem to be constrained by the size of a portal data structure, although I suspect that when we implement that part of an OS that we’ll find we want to put more, or more kinds or, data in the portal than we have now thought of. There is some need for the access to be power-of-two sized and aligned, and for hardware reasons it will probably be a multiple of the vector size even if we don’t need the bits.

In general, such member-specific details are of interest only to the OS and will sit behind a member-independent API.