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To: Elmer who wrote (57050)	10/3/2001 2:41:03 PM
From: Milan Shah	Respond to of 275872

You make a case for a highend need for 64bit but how does that create a need for the masses? How many years did it take for full 32bit computing to become commonplace after the intro of the i386? And BTW, aren't you going to need an operating system to support this vision? Is Linux going to support multiple virtual 32bit machines? Oddly enough, I think the demand is actually very mainstream. I started realizing this when I asked myself "why can't I share the 100s of pictures I take of my kids with my parents?" I needed a web-server. But that means I need a fire-wall as well. At the risk of using a cliche', I think such a system could breath adolescence into peer-to-peer computing - you can afford to have entire "virtual" machines participating in p2p networks, acting as scouting agents etc. If you let your imagination run wild, and move away from thinking about the status quo today, you'll be surprized at the possibilities. Secondly, one beauty of the multiple-vms is that you don't need OS support for it! Each 32-bit OS runs in its own VM, and the hardware is virtualized by a simple OS-switching piece of software. This said software will be a bit tricky to write, but it certainly is far, far simpler than a full OS - no need to build a file-system, gui, I/O interface, nothing. It can be a rather small piece of software. It may need a bunch of device drivers though, so as to be able to virtualize the hardware to the OSs. I believe such a piece of work already exists - called VMWay, that allows you to do this on 32-bit machines, but, of course, its very slow - it has to swap the entire memory out and back to/from disk. This means that you can switch between two running OS instances, but you can't do it in "real time" (ie, you can't switch between them so rapidly that each instance things its alive all the time). 64 bit computing will solve that easily - it would be a matter of adjusting the memory-mapping registers and page-tables.