> In short: message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just
> an excercise in computer science masturbation. It may feel good, but
> you don't actually get anything DONE. Nobody has ever shown that it
> made sense in the real world. It's basically just much simpler and
> saner to have a function call interface, and for operations that are
> non-local it gets transparently _promoted_ to a message. There's no
> reason why it should be considered to be a message when it starts out.
Well - there is. Because function calling leads to things like
ioctl(). And ioctl() is _evil_. Yes, linux-kernel interface without
ioctl-like things would be ok with me. Even ioctl() which is _always_
given a structure which begins with its own length would be ok. But
ioctl() as it is today is evil, because you may pass horrible things
like linklist of things to do. And it is hard to marshall _that_.
Linus, do you plan some kind of clustering support into linux? If
someone gave you simple syscall-over-net forwarder for linux, would
you like it?
Pavel
PS: Well - there is such forwarder in development around here. It does
not forward ioctl()s for obvious reasons :-). Major thing for
clustering seems to be 32bit pids just now.
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