"The obvious way to implement this is to expose the raw flash to the OS and put an abstraction layer into the OS that does what the drive firmware currently does so it can be used with existing filesystems."
It may or may not work better than what we have now. Doing so would require a lot more knowledge for the developers involved. Actually "developer" is a fancy term for a job that could not be called "engineering" for being almost completely insulated from that class of problems that an engineering job has to consider as a norm. Expose the raw flash (or other raw access to electrical components or what not) and you get yourself with real engineering problems on your hand. No more (software) "development", but engineering! And engineering is hard.
And there's one more thing - if we think the current state of software fragmentation is bad, wait until when this unified physical computing interface (that the firmwares more or less adhere to and which we're taking for granted today) is taken out.
> And there's one more thing - if we think the current state of software fragmentation is bad, wait until when this unified physical computing interface (that the firmwares more or less adhere to and which we're taking for granted today) is taken out.
It isn't about removing abstraction layers, only moving them. It should be part of the OS rather than the hardware. The people who write the abstraction layer have to deal with hard problems, but they do that now. What does it matter if they work for Microsoft and RedHat instead of Samsung and Intel?
The point is to publish and standardize how that abstraction layer works so the people who write filesystems and filesystem tools have better information and can suggest or provide improvements. And to stop forcing every SDD manufacturer to duplicate the software engineering efforts of the others instead of focusing on hardware.
It may or may not work better than what we have now. Doing so would require a lot more knowledge for the developers involved. Actually "developer" is a fancy term for a job that could not be called "engineering" for being almost completely insulated from that class of problems that an engineering job has to consider as a norm. Expose the raw flash (or other raw access to electrical components or what not) and you get yourself with real engineering problems on your hand. No more (software) "development", but engineering! And engineering is hard.
And there's one more thing - if we think the current state of software fragmentation is bad, wait until when this unified physical computing interface (that the firmwares more or less adhere to and which we're taking for granted today) is taken out.