Return to BSD News archive
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!paladin.american.edu!news.univie.ac.at!hp4at!mcsun!ieunet!dec4ie.ieunet.ie!jkh From: jkh@whisker.lotus.ie (Jordan K. Hubbard) Subject: "A challenge to all true kernel hackers" - STOP, start over! In-Reply-To: vjs@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com's message of Mon, 15 Mar 1993 01: 01:49 GMT Message-ID: <JKH.93Mar15175727@whisker.lotus.ie> Sender: usenet@ieunet.ie (USENET News System) Nntp-Posting-Host: whisker.lotus.ie Organization: Lotus Development Ireland References: <JKH.93Mar9214944@whisker.lotus.ie> <C3ow4H.FID@BitBlocks.com> <C3w61A.8wI@sugar.neosoft.com> <gl9nv8a@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com> Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1993 17:57:27 GMT Lines: 38 I guess I should have expected this.. When I issued my "challenge", I didn't mean it as a generic "let's make the entire filesystem more generic" challenge, I meant it as "Let's add conditional symbolic links to the existing system with a minimum of fuss!" sort of challenge. This is NOT to say that I think the current filesystem code isn't in urgent need of repair, or that NFS is really great (I'll probably spend 3 years in purgatory simply for mentioning "NFS" and "really great" in the same sentence), simply that it's not worth doing that much work to the existing mechanism. The reason I say this is obvious to anyone who's been following the 0.2 discussions. 0.2 already has a plan-9ish "portal" scheme in mind for handing things like custom filesystem types (want a compressing filesystem driver in user mode? No problem), and there will be a lot more genericity(?) in the way filenames will be mapped in general. What this means is that something like conditional symbolic links would be implemented in a radically different way come 0.2, but a lot of good research on how and why to use them could be done quite effectively in 0.1, so the effort wouldn't necesarily be wasted (think of it more as a proof-of-concept implementation). It also means that it should be done in a low-overhead fashion, since any significant work in reimplementing filesystem handling WOULD be wasted. In short, don't chuck anything (like NFS) out, just see what's required to put conditional symbolic links in. If it's too messy, forget about it. Jordan -- Jordan Hubbard Lotus Development Ireland jkh@whisker.lotus.ie 386bsd Patchkit Coordinator All-around nice dude. I do not speak for Lotus as that's not in my job description.