Of course this goes to a General Resolution

Posted Feb 12, 2014 18:27 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
In reply to: Of course this goes to a General Resolution by viro
Parent article: The Debian technical committee vote concludes

I'd actually love to see a kernel infrastructure that could enable those kinds of compatibility layers. Imagine a general infrastructure for redirecting a class of syscalls to a userspace helper, that could then implement shm and similar on top of more sensible APIs.

Of course this goes to a General Resolution

Posted Feb 12, 2014 19:13 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

> Imagine a general infrastructure for redirecting a class of syscalls to a userspace helper,
Congratulations, you just invented microkernels. Unfortunately, memory management and IPC are among the three things that really have to be in the kernel (the third one being scheduling), so I don't think what you proposed will ever happen.

Of course this goes to a General Resolution

Posted Feb 12, 2014 20:18 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

> Congratulations, you just invented microkernels.

Not at all. This is more along the lines of the compatibility layers glibc has to implement old functionality on top of newer and better kernel bits, except compatible with arbitrary userspace code not using glibc.

> Unfortunately, memory management and IPC are among the three things that really have to be in the kernel (the third one being scheduling), so I don't think what you proposed will ever happen.

Yes, they have to be in the kernel; that doesn't make it impossible to deprecate one family of system calls, ioctls, or similar mechanisms and redirect them to a compatibility layer that calls the new kernel mechanisms.