[tech] A project idea...

[Grahame Bowland]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 10:47:47PM +0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 28, 2002, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> >   o spread an ill-designed, poorly-scaling and not-so-stable 
> >     operating system. yay! [0]
> 
> > ones in the corridor are M68K based. They're not likely to have a 
> > Memory Management Unit and that means you can't have seperate kernel /
> > userland memory maps or enforse memory boundries between processes.
> 
> Uhm, which m68k? :)

I remember I looked it up once in my pre-cynic days and discovered 
those particular macs don't have an MMU. But by all means look it up :)

> > [0] I'll pay that this is flamebait. However, just looking at graphs 
> >     at performance between 2.2 and 2.4 and quite a bit of experience 
> >     doing Linux admin stuff makes me actually believe this. It doesn't 
> >     make me believe that anything else is necessarily better though :)
> 
> Yay. Finally, I find someone who agrees with me!
> Adrian, already a unix cynic

The thing I love most about Unix is nice, plain text configuration
files. And a nice clean division between state and configuration. These 
are the things that make it Good. Plain text config because you can 
see what is set up. Division of state because you can nuke the state 
containing files and get things back to a useful start-point.

The actual syscalls and things like that aren't that nice. A lot of
things just seem far too painful or have been left out entirely. For 
example to watch a directory for events (such as a new file being 
created), or to watch a file for modification takes OS-specific hacks 
like inodemon. It's absolutely trivial in BeOS I'm sure :) The list 
is quite long: async I/O, nice easy IPC/RPC, ...

Not all of these are functions of the core "kernel" but the way Linux 
is implemented a lot of kernel support would be necessary. And anyway 
UNIX refers to the entire environment.

If Unix was better, squid could be portable and not spend all of its 
time in a select() loop *grin*

-- 
"At a risk of being called sexist, ageist and French, if you put multimedia, 
a leather skirt and lipstick on a grandmother and take her to a nightclub, 
she's still not going to get lucky." - JLG on Windows