Re: Rumpification (was Re: CVS commit: src/usr.sbin/envstat)

[uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost (Valeriy E. Ushakov)]

David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:

> The goal of these rumpified programs is to run on the host kernel but
> operate on the/a rump kernel; that is, you run ifconfig at your shell
> prompt and instead of configuring the interfaces of the kernel you're
> running on, it configures interfaces of some rump kernel somewhere.
> 
> This means that the knowledge of which operations have to be sent to
> the rump kernel can be placed only in ifconfig, because only ifconfig
> knows which operations need to be local and which are supposed to be
> proxied across to the rump kernel and affect the rump kernel instead
> of the local kernel.
>
> Well and good; it's true (AFAICT), what pooka's trying to do can't be
> done less intrusively. The problem is that what he's trying to do is
> the wrong thing.

Isn't that exactly the problem that was solved by plan9 by postulating
that everything is a file + appropriate namespace construction?

-uwe