Nice article... but light on technical details [LWN.net]

Nice article... but light on technical details

Posted Jul 21, 2011 18:37 UTC (Thu) by alfille (subscriber, #1631)
In reply to: Nice article... but light on technical details by civodul
Parent article: Signs of life from GNU Hurd

Your references are helpful, but seem very dated. VAX, ftp, Xerox NS are the examples given. One worries that the design hasn't evolved.

The "translators" seem similar to FUSE in allowing user space filesystems. Could you describe the differences?

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Nice article... but light on technical details

Posted Jul 21, 2011 19:09 UTC (Thu) by sthibaul (✭ supporter ✭, #54477) [Link]

Translators are not only about files, but also network, user authentication, sound stream, etc. Everything in the system actually.

For instance, on a Linux system, to use a VPN, you need to set up a tap, which is a privileged thing. With translators, since the TCP/IP stack itself is not hardwired in the kernel but translated, you can start your own stack as a translator, using a UDP stream via the main TCP/IP stack to send packets to some remote place, and then you can make your application use that translator, thus getting the VPN feature without needing privileges.