Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: kernel stack challenge | Date | Tue, 06 Apr 2004 22:44:20 -0400 | From | Horst von Brand <> |
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Sergiy Lozovsky <serge_lozovsky@yahoo.com> said: > --- Timothy Miller <miller@techsource.com> wrote: > > Horst von Brand wrote:
> > > OK, so you need the policy to be interpreted in-kernel (dunno why > > > a largeish high-level general purpose language is needed for that, > > > when a tiny interpreter for a specialized language will do very well, > > > and has been shown to work fine), and written in a "high level > > > language" so that your garden variety sysadmin _can_ write her own > > > policy, but it really doesn't matter because she'll never have to do > > > so...
> > > Completely lost me.
> > I was getting hung up on that one too, but I didn't > > know how to say it. > > You did a nice job. :)
> Can you guys be more specific? I don't see any > technical objections.
As they say around here "No hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver" (roughly, "There is no worse blindness than not wanting to see")...
> The only one is that performance > would suffer because of use of higher level language > than C or Assembler.
Because the performance and size of kernel code is _critical_, maybe? Because much of the kernel code has been carefully tuned for maximum performance perhaps?
> There is a reason people use languages like PERL, Java > and so on.
And there are solid reasons for _not_ writing operating system kernels in them too...
> I would prefer to spend less time writing > actual code - this is what these high level languages > for. If performance would be most important - people > would do everything in Assembler, but they don't. I'd > better write a small Assembler subroutine which will > handle stack problems for me and benefit from using > the high level language after that.
And then there is the technology of _inventing_ a language tailored to the task at hand... even better than your list of high-level languages.
> There were times when userland projects were written > in Assembler. Now people are using other languages, > too.
In part because a mediocre compiler these days gives better code than an assembly language coder by hand... and you can compile it for next year's machine too.
> May be it's time to try something new in the > kernel, too :-) Or we will not consider that because > nobody did that before? Someone should be the first > :-)
It's your time you are wasting... have my blessing. -- Dr. Horst H. von Brand User #22616 counter.li.org Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431 Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239 Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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