Torsion will eventually be a single address space multitasking operating system with transparent data persistence. This means that neither the user nor the application programmer needs to know or care about the fact that system memory is only transient and must be written to disk in order to persist across reboots. All of those details are taken care of by the operating system, so that once a document or any data is created, it exists until it's explicitly destroyed. Sort of like objects in the real world.
Right now, Torsion is in its early implementation stages. Here's what's working:
- basics of page-based log-structured storage system
- memory checkpoints and recovery
- protected mode boot loader
- physical/virtual memory manager
- hardware and software interrupts
- floppy disk driver with DMA
- online API documentation
Download
Torsion 0.0.14, released April 21, 2002, is now available.What this means is that you can write a value to anywhere in memory, perform a checkpoint, trip over the power cable, and then on the next boot that value will still be exactly where you set it in memory.
- basic persistence works
I welcome all comments, ideas, criticism, questions, etc.Dan Helfman <witten@torsion.org>
