Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 14:00:32 -0500 From: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd@over-yonder.net> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> Cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Meta: explain what where when? (was Re: userland access to devices is moving!) Message-ID: <20030618190032.GG10127@over-yonder.net> In-Reply-To: <42575.1055961734@critter.freebsd.dk> References: <20030618174733.GC10127@over-yonder.net> <42575.1055961734@critter.freebsd.dk>
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On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 08:42:14PM +0200 I heard the voice of Poul-Henning Kamp, and lo! it spake thus: > In message <20030618174733.GC10127@over-yonder.net>, "Matthew D. Fuller" writes: > > > >Speaking as somebody whose reach of mailing lists notably exceeds his > >grasp (as it always should be; otherwise what fun is it?), I often find > >myself a little in the dark on what these sort of things really /mean/ to > >the system in the end, and I think it would be a nice extension of these > >sort of posts/proposals to have a sentence of summary, along the lines > >of: > > Well, what can I say but: "You're right". > > I do on the other hand not think that emails to arch@ is the best forum > for the in-depth explanations. Oh, absolutely! And to understand an in-depth explanation, I'd have to dig into the code anyway to understand it. I was aiming more at a throwaway statement like, "This will clean up a lot of code and make it easier to understand and debug," or "This straightens out the code structure and let us add more things onto it more easily," or "This will improve performance for things that do a lot of grubbing to /dev nodes. Your dump(8) will run 3% faster." That last is actually more specific than I have in mind. No guarantee, just a general statement of direction. From my armchair, it's fairly easy to give a "75% cleanup, 20% architecture, 5% performance" 3-axis guesstimate of how this moves us forward, and even such a general direction is an enormous aid to those of us who don't really understand where this plugs into the system. Reading the discussion of this change, I'd say "This is a structural cleanup that eliminates some complexity and makes it easier to understand and add onto, with the 'cleanup' features related to the reduced complexity. It may also yield a small real-world performance improvement for things that do a lot of /dev/* fiddling." Just a thumbnail sketch of whether this is moving us down the path, or hacking out thorns that are keeping us from moving down the path, etc. > The "blueprint" articles which I am trying to restart in DĉmonNews > may not be either, but I think they are more the right kind of > forum for it. I am still warming up to the article format, and the > amount of feedback so far has not really given me any feel for how > complex issues I can tackle without the readers just skipping the > article. That's an interesting way to go, and certainly something worthwhile. Poking at the site now, I see the one from May on userland/kernel interfaces; has there been more? -- Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | fullermd@over-yonder.net Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/ "The only reason I'm burning my candle at both ends, is because I haven't figured out how to light the middle yet"
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