What kind of things would you wnat in the GNU OS

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <4455 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>But is it really doing that much more?

Ay, there's the rub.

>What's the 5.2.3 kernel doing that the V7 kernel didn't do?
>	VM.

Adds a modest amount of code, for the SVR3 "region" approach.

>	Streams.

May actually save code, slightly.  (Replaces clists.)

>	RFS support (basically modifying namei() to support the network).

Having any network protocol stuff in the kernel takes up space.

>	termio instead of sgtty.

Adds a modest amount of code.

>What have I missed? And how much does it really take?

SVR3 also has three additional types of IPC, not counting FIFOs
(which take up a modest amount of additional code).

It has record locking, and in general an fcntl mechanism.

It has larger buffers and more caching, for performance reasons.

It has a bunch of administrative, logging, tracing, etc. features
that we probably agree it could do without.

Generally, there doesn't seem to be very good reason for the kernel
being as large as it currently is.