Re: dynamically allocating chunks from shared memory

From: Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
To: Markus Wanner <markus(at)bluegap(dot)ch>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>, PostgreSQL-development Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: dynamically allocating chunks from shared memory
Date: 2010-07-22 13:59:08
Message-ID: 4C484EAC.10302@2ndquadrant.com
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Markus Wanner wrote:
> On 07/20/2010 09:05 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> Hmm, deriving code from a paper published by IBM sounds like bad news --
>> who knows what patents they hold on the techniques there?
>
> Yeah, that might be an issue. Note, however, that the lock-based
> variant differs substantially from what's been published. And I sort
> of doubt their patents covers a lot of stuff that's not lock-free-ish.

There's a fairly good mapping of what techniques are patented and which
were only mentioned in research in the Sun dynamic memory patent at
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7328316.html ; that mentions an earlier
paper by the author of the technique Markus is using, but this was from
before that one was written. It looks like Sun has a large portion of
the patent portfolio in this area, which is particularly troublesome now.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.us

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