Re: [klibc] klibc and what's the next step?

[Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>]

On Sat, Jul 01, 2006 at 01:08:17PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sat, 1 Jul 2006, Theodore Tso wrote:
> > 
> > This is going to be a problem given that people are hell-bent at
> > chucking functionality out of the kernel into userspace.
> 
> Btw, I'm not necessarily one of those people.
> 
> There _are_ some things that can be better done in user space, but on the 
> other hand, other things really are better off in the kernel.
> 
> The argument that user space is more debuggable has been shown to be 
> largely a red herring. User space is only more debuggable if it does 
> something independent, and we've seen that user space is _harder_ to debug 
> than kernel space if we have events going back and forth.

True.  However, that depends on the interfaces being used.  Sure, when
a twit "moves things to userland" by marshalling stuff through sysfs,
the only thing it achieves is more sysfs crap *and* more internal kernel
APIs being cast in stone.

However, when the code really is a series of normal syscalls (on the level
of "all we call is sys_something()"), it makes a lot of sense to take the
damn thing to userland and leave it there...