Re: UNIX kernel notification system

[Matthew Mondor <mm_lists%pulsar-zone.net@localhost>]

On Mon, 3 Oct 2011 00:40:46 -0700
Erik Fair <fair%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:

> Why not a classification/taxonomy of kernel missives? This doesn't mean we 
> can't continue to have relatively free form (and possibly amusing) text for 
> those conditions we're not yet prepared to classify/codify yet ('cause 
> they're rare, or debug, or ... whatever). The potential for win is in making 
> (or retaining) software parse-ability to enable software response.

Interestingly this very paragraph reminds me of Common Lisp signals
and restarts; signals can be conditions or errors and hold structure
(and inheritence), blocks of code may ignore or catch them, uncatched
exceptions may be handled by software including the invokation of
restarts, or left alone to be routed to the debugger (which is even
overridable through a hook), and there is support for stack-unwind
protected code which gets executed no matter if an exception causes a
long jump out.

Of course, all of this seems overkill for our purposes, but probably
worth mentioning for inspiration...
-- 
Matt