Re: [ANN] Lunatik -- NetBSD kernel scripting with Lua (GSoC project

[Lourival Vieira Neto <lourival.neto%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 9:24 PM, Matthew Mondor 
<mm_lists%pulsar-zone.net@localhost> wrote:
> (...)
> Which makes me wonder: should there be a feature to optionally link
> kernel-level scripts with the kernel image, so that with monolithic
> setups, file system script loading could be disabled, without affecting
> future functionality that might depend on kernel-space Lua scripts?  By
> extension, perhaps that kernel-space scripts could be provided as part
> of kernel modules, which can already be either built monolithic or
> modular.  I know linking text (or bytecode) blobs after an objcopy step
> would be easily, as well as mapping them to names which a loader can
> look for, but I'm not familiar enough with the new modular system to
> know if this is realistic without too much effort.

It is already possible to embed scripts in the kernel image or in
kernel modules. However, I think that you are missing the main point
of having a scripting language in-kernel. Yes, a scripting language is
useful for kernel developers extending their own subsystem/module or
even to develop it, but (IMHO) the real strength of having a scripting
language in-kernel is to allow users/applications  to adapt the kernel
operation to their needs. My proposal isn't to write a kernel in Lua,
but to empower users to adjust the kernel behavior by writing Lua
scripts. I think that would be very useful to distribute official
scripts, but it would be even more useful to let users to adapt these
scripts to their needs. For example, a data center administrator could
define his own policy to schedule processes and to manage the power
usage; a network administrator could completely tune the network
traffic processing; a cluster user could receive a time slot to his
processes and manage it with his own rules; and so on..

Cheers,
--
Lourival Vieira Neto