Architectural and Operating System Support for Orthogonal Persistence

Over the past ten years much research effort has been expended in attempting to build systems which support orthogonal persistence. Such systems allow all data to persist for an arbitrary length of time, possibly longer than the creating program, and support access and manipulation of data in a uniform manner, regardless of how long it persists. Persistent systems are usually based on a persistent store which provides storage for objects. Most existing persistent systems have been developed above conventional architectures and/or operating systems. In this paper we argue that conventional architectures provide an inappropriate base for persistent object systems and that we must look towards new architectures if we are to achieve acceptable performance. The examples given are based on the Monads architecture which provides explicit hardware support for persistence and objects. 1. INTRODUCTION Over the past ten years much research effort has been expended in attempting to build systems w...