Standards Update, IEEE 1003.4: Real-time Extensions

[peter da silva]

From:  peter da silva <peter at ficc.ferranti.com>

In article <488 at usenix.ORG> fouts at bozeman.bozeman.ingr (Martin Fouts) writes:
> > My personal opinion is that *anything* that can go into the file system
> > name space *should*. That's what makes UNIX UNIX... that it's all visible
> > from the shell...

> I'm not sure which Unix you've been running for the past five or more
> years, but a lot of stuff doesn't live in the file system name space
> under various BSD derived systems,

Yes, and there's even more stuff in System V that doesn't live in that
name space. In both cases it's *wrong*.

> nor do the networking types believe
> it belongs there.

Some more details on this subject would be advisable. I'm aware that not
everything *can* go in the file system name space, by the way...

> IMHO neither does a process handle, nor a
> semaphore, and don't even talk to me about "named pipes" as an IPC
> mechanism.

An active semaphore can be implemented any way you want, but it should
be represented by an entry in the name space. The same goes for process
handles and so on.

Named pipes are an inadequate mechanism for much IPC, but they work quite
well for many simple cases. If you're looking at them as some sort of
paragon representing the whole concept, you're sadly mistaken.

Anyway... what is it that makes "dev/win" more worthy of having an entry
in "/dev" than "dev/socket"?
-- 
Peter da Silva.   `-_-'
+1 713 274 5180.   'U`
peter at ferranti.com

Volume-Number: Volume 21, Number 87