From: hedrick@dumas.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Subject: Re: Deadline for 0.13 Date: 5 Feb 1992 04:07:38 GMT
I agree with keeping the kernel small. I've ported several things,
and had little trouble with missing kernel facilities. I'd just as
soon not have things like System V semaphores, shared memory, etc.
Non-blocking tty I/O is essential to several kinds of applications,
and there will probably be a few other features like that, but I agree
that it's a mistake to put much more in the kernel.
The challenge is going to be to provide some basis for networking
without doubling the size of the kernel. Is there any chance you can
come up with a way to write TCP outside the kernel without losing
performance badly? There's a version of KA9Q that is designed to run
as a set of programs outside the kernel. There's a single server that
acts as a protocol engine. Applications talk to it rather than making
system calls. It uses System V shared memory and semaphores to talk
between the processes. If you could come up with a way to keep the
performance penalty of this down, it might be worth looking at.
I'd like to see priority in 0.13 (and maybe 0.14) put on completing
libc. In the ports I've done, the main area I've found lacking is in
that area: floating point support in the library (gcc compiles calls
to helper routines that don't exist), and various other random things
like alloca, bcopy/bcmp/bzero, regex, etc. I suspect we've identified
most of the missing stuff by now, and people have come up with them as
part of the source to various programs they've ported.