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From: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net>
Message-Id: <199704201357.IAA00978@dyson.iquest.net>
Subject: Re: Price of FreeBSD (was On Holy Wars...)
In-Reply-To: <335A00EF.E5A@wgold.demon.co.uk> from James Mansion at "Apr 20, 97 12:41:35 pm"
To: james@wgold.demon.co.uk (James Mansion)
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 08:57:02 -0500 (EST)
Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
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> 
> I would have though that some very minor performance hit would be
> worthwhile if you could make it much easier to:
>  - add new file systems, preferably layered too
>
Working on that.  Adding new FS's is fairly easy, but the
semantics are changing soon in order to support layering,
and to make the FS design a little more consistant.
Previously, we had tried to stay approximately compatible
with the other *BSDs.  That will likely go away with our
new LFS -- it will be very VM friendly.

>
>  - add support for native interpreted systems, such as Java
>
It isn't hard to do now...  Just create a new image activator.

>
>  - add new system calls
>
Trivial.  You can add them dynamically.  It is a good way to
test new system code.  You can add them statically by modifying
a table, and adding the code into your tree.

>
>  - add new 'objects' that can be integrated into select() or
>    poll() [in particular, threads and synchronisation primitives]
> 
Interesting idea.

At least as a kernel hacker, a person can zero in on the code that
is needed to do things within a few hours, given source code.  With
the alternatives like UNIX or WinNT, you don't get source code, and
are very dependent on limited interfaces.

John