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    SubjectRe: [Announce] BKL shifting into drivers and filesystems - beware
    Date
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    "Jeff V. Merkey" <jmerkey@timpanogas.com> said:

    [...]

    > I'm posting MANOS today -- there's an NT flavor DLL loader in the
    > sources if you want to look at it that's more like Microsoft's than the
    > one in Linux. NT uses something called a forwarder chain in the DLL
    > loader to handle this problem for dynanmically linked modules, though I
    > agree that the way they do it is an absolute hack. They allow the
    > loader to detect changed APIs and insert a "forwarder" function when the
    > external reference is resolved by the DLL loader -- this function
    > evenually calls the real function in kernel but if it's added a
    > parameter or something, it lets you slip in a forwarder function to
    > fixup the stack and munge the parms if someone altered an interface.
    > Something like this would allow us to go modular, and give you the
    > flexibility you want, but I agree it's still going to be a f_cking
    > nightmare to get this thing coordinated properly. You may want to
    > consider diverging after 2.4 and create a "modular" linux tree and see
    > how many of us bite on it (I certainly would).

    To maintain the "forwarders" sounds like as much (if not more) work than
    just fixing the errant modules in the first place. Plus you loose the
    flexibility of changing data structures and functions which are inlined and
    just #included, which is exactly the advantage Linus was talking about.
    --
    Dr. Horst H. von Brand mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl
    Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431
    Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239
    Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513

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