Hello,

Generally speaking, a job is a group of related processes all descended 
from a point of entry
process and identified by a unique job identifier (jid). A job can 
contain multiple process
groups or sessions, and all processes in one of these subgroups can only 
be contained within
a single job.

We (SGI) have been running the PAGG/JOB/CSA stack on our linux platform 
(Altix) for
serveral years now. Now we are trying to push the whole stack to 
community kernel. PAGG
is getting accepted into 2.6.8-rc3-mm2 , and the interest on CSA is 
growing, the discussion
thread is at http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0408.3/0641.html

Between PAGG and CSA is the JOB kernel module. I have posted the Job 
kernel module
patch a couple of times.  As Chris Wright kindly pointed out, job uses 
iotcl on /proc/job
binary interface, which is not an appropriate kernel and user space 
communication interface in
linux, but instead job should promote to use a real syscall or should 
implement a file system
for it.

Actually Job was using system calls initially before we changed it to 
ioctl's on /proc for
the reason that job does not have a system call number. Also it seems to 
me that a file system is
not very suitable to the functionality of Job provides.

I am willing to make the necessary changes to get Job accepted into the 
community kernel.
I hope I can get some help on how to improving the job kernel/user 
interface, system call,
file system, device driver, or whatever is appropriate for job's 
functionality. Any suggestion
or comment will be appreciated.

I attach the job patch for 2.6.8 here again for your convinence, and 
always you can find
more about job user library and command at http://oss.sgi.com/projects/pagg

Thank you!

Signed-off-by: Limin Gu <limin@sgi.com>

--
Limin Gu - Linux System Software
Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, CA