Re: [patch 05/11] syslets: core code

[Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org>]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> 
> 
> On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > 
> > the core syslet / async system calls infrastructure code.
> 
> Ok, having now looked at it more, I can say:
> 
>  - I hate it.
> 
> I dislike it intensely, because it's so _close_ to being usable. But the 
> programming interface looks absolutely horrid for any "casual" use, and 
> while the loops etc look like fun, I think they are likely to be less than 
> useful in practice. Yeah, you can do the "setup and teardown" just once, 
> but it ends up being "once per user", and it ends up being a lot of stuff 
> to do for somebody who wants to just do some simple async stuff.
> 
> And the whole "lock things down in memory" approach is bad. It's doing 
> expensive things like mlock(), making the overhead for _single_ system 
> calls much more expensive. Since I don't actually believe that the 
> non-single case is even all that interesting, I really don't like it.
> 
> I think it's clever and potentially useful to allow user mode to see the 
> data structures (and even allow user mode to *modify* them) while the 
> async thing is running, but it really seems to be a case of excessive 
> cleverness.

Ok, that makes the wierdo-count up to two :) I agree with you that the 
chained API can be improved at least.



- Davide


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