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    SubjectRe: Migrating to larger numbers
    On Sun, May 30, 1999 at 10:44:38AM -0700, Tim Smith wrote:
    ...
    > Uhm...32 bits will cover 4 billion users. Still, considering the trend
    > toward ISP mergers, and the trend toward everyone getting online, it might
    > be a good idea to allow everyone on the planet to have a unique uid, and
    > so going past 32 bits could be a good idea.

    I *do* serve several 100k ISP customers per box with about 15 UIDs
    in the system. All those customers have *same* uid.
    So, I don't see that "uid equate to user" is necessary unless you really
    want to support NFS/CODA/AFS mounts to billions of people.

    Of course, doing NFS support at campus-wide setup is an interesting thing
    all by itself, but that is *not* a thing that any sane ISP would do!

    > How many problems would be introduced by making them both 128 bits and
    > using the UUID algorithm to generate uids and gids?

    A lot! Going to 32-bits with current glibc-2.1 things is easy,
    because the userspace is already 32-bits and "all" you need are new
    syscalls with enlarged __kernel_uid_t and __kernel_gid_t, but going
    into larger ones will cause pain in form of requiring a set of new
    syscalls *AND* user-visible libc changes forcing to change also lots
    of programs now using uids and gids. Things might not be as simple
    as 'just recompile'...

    Using 64-bits allows treating them as integers, but 128-bits are not
    usually supported as integers by gcc/egcs..

    Also, unless you want to make things to perform poorly at all of these
    popular register-poor intel based systems (hopefully ia-64 is radically
    different!), then you should NOT use even 64-bit values more than
    absolutely necessary!

    > --Tim Smith

    /Matti Aarnio <matti.aarnio@sonera.fi>

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