Re: Things that Longhorn seems to be doing right

Joseph Pingenot
2003-10-30T02:03:27Z

>From Theodore Ts'o on Wednesday, 29 October, 2003:
>Keep in mind that just because Windows does thing a certain way
>doesn't mean we have to provide the same functionality in exactly the
>same way.
>Also keep in mind that Microsoft very deliberately blurs what they do
>in their "kernel" versus what they provide via system libraries (i.e.,
>API's provided via their DLL's, or shared libraries).

Indeed, although certain things could be half-kernel, half-user
(OK, 0.01% kernel, 99.99% user, e.g. userspace daemon that
intercepts certain writes). Of course, at that point, you might
make a special library to interact with the daemon directly, although
it's then not at all like just calling write().

Actually, thinking about it, it's ideal to have as a pluggable userspace
daemon: on open() or a little after, determine the filetype, and forward
interactions to a module/plugin that knows how to deal with that
data format. The plugin then calls some under-process (either back to
the daemon or some other thing) to then archive off the information.

>At some level what they have done can be very easily replicated by
>having a userspace database which is tied to the filesystem so you can
>do select statements to search on metadata assocated with files. We
>can do this simply by associating UUID's to files, and storing the
>file metadata in a MySQL database which can be searched via
>appropriate userspace libraries which we provide.
>
>Please do **not** assume that just because of the vaporware press
>releases released by Microsoft that (a) they have pushed an SQL Query
>optimizer into the kernel, or that (b) even if they did, we should
>follow their bad example and attempt to do the same.

Indeed. I prefer to keep my crashes in userspace. :)

>There are multiple ways of skinning this particular cat, and we don't
>need to blindly follow Microsoft's design mistakes.

Amen, my brother! ;)

>Fortunately, I have enough faith in Linus Torvalds' taste that I'm not
>particularly worried what would happen if someone were to send him a
>patch that attempted to cram MySQL or Postgres into the guts of the
>Linux kernel.... although I would like to watch when someone proposes
>such a thing!

heh.

-Joseph
--
Joseph===============================================trelane@digitasaru.net
"Asked by CollabNet CTO Brian Behlendorf whether Microsoft will enforce its
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An audience member pointed out that many open source projects aren't
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well,' said Mundie. 'Get your money, and let's go to court.'
Microsoft's patents only defensive? http://swpat.ffii.org/players/microsoft