lkml.org 
[lkml]   [1999]   [Jun]   [22]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: Some very thought-provoking ideas about OS architecture.


On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> The real issue here is paradigms. The classical "everything's
> a file" broke down with the advent of networking, sockets and
> non-blocking reads. At the moment the file paradigm is so much
> out of touch with computational reality that web servers need
> to fork for each client and people are crying out for asynchronous
> sendfile and other weird interfaces.

Sure. But I think it's still a valid paradigm to consider "everything is a
stream of bytes". And that's _really_ what the UNIX paradigm has been from
the first: the whole notion of pipes etc is not all that different from
networking.

> A new "everything's a message" WILL fit the current use of computers
> though. One simple concept that's good enough for all our
> computational needs. And because it _is_ one simple concept, it can
> be implemented in a simple, clean and fast way -- unlike the myriad
> of different kludges Unix has to overcome the file paradigm...

I disagree.

The issue is not how you get the data from one place to the other:
"read()" is as good as way as "rcv()". Message passing is not the issue.

The real issue is _naming_, and that's not going away. The name space has
always been the difficult part. And that's where I agree that UNIX could
do better: I think we do want to move into a "web direction" where you can
just do a open("http://ssss.yyyyy.dd/~silly", O_RDONLY) and it does the
right thing.

Linus


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 13:52    [W:0.209 / U:0.024 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site