What O/S or hardware feature would be useful for databases?

[Lincoln Yeoh <lyeoh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I've been wondering, what O/S or hardware feature would be useful for 
databases?

If Postgresql developers could get the CPU and O/S makers to do 
things that would make certain things easier/faster (and in the long 
term) what would they be?

By long term I mean it's not something that's only useful for a few 
years. Not something "gimmicky".

For example - something like virtual memory definitely made many 
things easier. Hardware support for virtualization also makes stuff 
like vmware easier and better.

Seems CPU makers currently have more transistors than they know what 
to do with, so they're adding cores and doing a lot of boring stuff 
like SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, etc.

So is there anything else useful that they (and the O/S ppl) can do 
that they aren't doing already?

Better support for distributed locking (across cluster nodes etc)? OK 
that's old stuff, but the last I checked HP was burying VMS and Tandem.

Hardware acceleration for quickly counting the number of 
set/unset/matching bits?

Regards,
Link.