What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?

[Jim Frost]

In article <106326 at sun.Eng.Sun.COM> bitbug (James Buster) writes:
|What kinds of things should be in the GNU Kernel?

I'm not sure about for the GNU kernel, but some of my wish list follows.

There should be at least three ways to start multiprocessing:  fork(),
thread(), and spawn().  In addition to wait() there could be an
explicit join(), although I admit that this is damned easy to write
anyway.  Note that the addition of thread probably means you'll want a
bunch of thread-control calls, but I suppose you could get by without
them.

It would be nice to have a means of reassigning the controlling
terminal of a process, eg attach().

Installable/uninstallable device drivers; kernel rebuilds work but
dammit I hate waiting.

Cleaner networking.  I'd really like to have something like
'open("/dev/network/tcp/bu-cs/1024", O_RDWR)', but I'm flexible.  It
might be nice to use the filesystem abstraction for everything,
although I admit that this would bottleneck (at least for open()).
I'm sort of in favor of a meta-root (not really a fs) anyway.

Block-pipes.  The character-pipe is a wonderful thing but it sure
makes dealing with blocks of data a pain.

I could probably come up with others, but I'm interested in what
other people want.  Not particularly interested in compatibility with
current systems if incompatibility makes things much cleaner....

jim frost
software tool & die
madd at bu-it.bu.edu