Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 5 Oct 2005 11:26:50 +0100 | From | Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <> | Subject | Re: what's next for the linux kernel? |
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On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 06:40:33PM -0500, Chase Venters wrote:
> Work on dbus and HAL should give us good improvements in these areas. One
dbus. total waste of several man-years of effort that could have been better spent in e.g. removing the dependency of posix draft 4 threads from freedce (which i finally did last month) and e.g. adding an ultra-fast shared-memory transport plugin.
hal. _excellent_. look forward to it being ported to win32 so that it's useful for the kde-win32 port etc. etc.
> remaining challenge I see is system configuration - each daemon tends to > adopt its own syntax for configuration, which means that providing a GUI for > novice users to manage these systems means attacking each problem separately > and in full.
that's quite straightforward to deal with but it _does_ mean using a unified approach to writing APIs.
NT solved this problem by writing graphical tools in c and then adopting dce/rpc as the means to administer the services both locally _and_ remotely.
wholesale. utterly. everything. right from the simplest things like rebooting the machine, through checking the MAC addresses of cards (NetTransportEnum) all the way up to DNS administration - yes, dnsadmin.exe will write out DNS zone files in proper bind format.
it's quite a brave choice to take.
> Now I certainly wouldn't advocate a Windows-style registry, > because I think it's full of obvious problems.
such as? :)
they're not obvious to me. at the risk of in-for-penny, in-for-pound _radically_ off-topic discussion encouragement here, and also for completeness should someone come back to the archives in some years or months and go "what obvious problems", could you kindly elaborate?
one i can think of is "eek, my system's broken, eek, i can't even use vi to edit the configs".
and having described the problem, then.. .. well... actually... it's simply dealt with:
http://www.bindview.com/Services/RAZOR/Utilities/Unix_Linux/ntreg_readme.cfm
todd sabin wrote a linux filesystem driver which is read-only, so at least half the work's done.
(and the reactos people have written a complete implementation of a registry, btw).
> Nevertheless, it would be nice > to have some kind of configuration editor abstraction library that had some > sort of syntax definition database to allow for some interesting work on > GUIs.
i have to say this: it's almost too radical, dude :)
he he.
> In any case, I think pretty much all of this work lives outside the kernel.
ACK!
... well... not entirely.
a "registry" - god help us - would need to be stored on a filesystem. and then, ideally, made accessible a la todd sabin's ntreg driver - via a POSIX interface (because the linux kernel doesn't _do_ anything other than POSIX filesystems *sigh*). and that makes it also convenient to access from kernelspace, too.
hey, you know what? if linux got a registry, it would be possible for the kernel to access - and store, and communicate - persistent information.
conveniently.
hurrah.
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