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

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

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 8:10 AM, Antti Kantee <pooka%cs.hut.fi@localhost> wrote:
> On Tue Oct 05 2010 at 18:24:48 -0300, Lourival Vieira Neto wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I'm glad to announce the results of my GSoC project this year [1].
>> We've created the support for scripting the NetBSD kernel with Lua,
>> which we called Lunatik and it is composed by a port of the Lua
>> interpreter to the kernel, a kernel programming interface for
>> extending subsystems and a user-space interface for loading user
>> scripts into the kernel. You can see more details on [2]. I am
>> currently working on the improvement of its implementation, on the
>> documentation and on the integration between Lunatik and other
>> subsystems, such as npf(9), to provide a real usage scenario.
>
> Cool.
>
> I'm looking forward to seeing your evaluation of real usage scenarios.
> If you can find some existing policy code written in C and convert it to
> lua, it would make a strong case.  The main metric I'm interested in is
> convenience, and performance to some degree depending on what kind of
> places your plan to put lua scripts in.  At least in the packet filter
> use case the performance is quite critical.

I'm not too worried about performance issues before running it and
having some measures. Anyway, I'm quite open to suggestions =). Do you
have any special existing policy in mind?

> I don't know how well the fibonacci example performs (and the performance
> is not very critical there), but I'm sure you'll agree that from the
> convenience pov it is a very strong case _against_ lua ;)
> (yes, I realize it's not provided for demonstrating convenience)

Fibonacci is just a foo example and it was the first Lua code that I
ran inside the kernel. It was supposed to be as useful as a 'hello
world', nothing else. However, I do not agree with you, I think it
shows a strength of Lua: simplicity ;-) Anyway, you can replace the
fibo code for any more convenient function.

--
Lourival Vieira Neto