Standards Update, IEEE 1003.4: Real-time Extensions

[Scott E. Preece]

From:  preece at urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece)

| From:  sp at mysteron.osf.org (Simon Patience)

| The reason for semaphores not being in the file system is twofold. Some
| realtime embedded systems do not have a file system but do want semaphores
| So this allows them to have them without having to bring in the baggage a
| file system would entail.
---
I don't care whether they have something that looks like UNIX filesystem
code or not, or whether they have disk drives or not, but I don't think
it's unreasonable to require them to handle semaphore names as though
they were in a filesystem namespace.  Otherwise you're going to end up
with a collection of independent features, each minimally specified so
that it can work without assuming anything else, and anyone with any
sense is going to say "Yuck" and use a real operating system that
provides reasonable integration and for a uniform notion of, among other
things, naming.
---
| ...		 Secondly, as far as threads, which are supposed to
| be light weight, are concerned it allows semaphores to be implmented in user
| space rather than forcing them into the kernel for the file system.
---
Eh?  I don't know what the group has proposed since the ballot, but it
would seem that using a filesystem name only makes a difference when you
first specify you're going to be looking at a particular semaphore,
which shouldn't be a critical path event.  After that you use a file
descriptor, which I think could be handled in user space about as well
as anything else.  In either case you're going to have to go to the
kernel when scheduling is required (when you block or when you release
the semaphore).
---
| A good reason for *not* having IPC handles in the file system is to allow
| network IPC to use the same interfaces. If you have IPC handles in the
| file system then two machines who have applications trying to communicate
| would also have to have at least part of their file system name space to
| be shared. This is non trivial to arrange for two machines so can you
| imaging the problem of doing this for 100 (or 1000?) machines.
---
You're going to have to synchronize *some* namespace anyway, why
shouldn't it be a piece of the filesystem namespace?

A consistent approach to naming and name resolution for ALL global
objects should be one of the basic requirements for any new POSIX (or
UNIX!) functionality.  We should have *one* namespace so that we can
write general tools that only need to know about one namespace.
--
scott preece
motorola/mcd urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
uucp:	uunet!uiucuxc!udc!preece,	 arpa:	preece at urbana.mcd.mot.com

Volume-Number: Volume 21, Number 75