Re: Translucent storage: design, pros, and cons

[Pierre THIERRY]

Scribit Jonathan S. Shapiro dies 10/01/2007 hora 18:21:
> Little progress has been made. I have spent much of the past year
> trying to ensure that a concrete system design would be able to
> support the HURD, and I now learn that this effort may have been
> largely misdirected. Or perhaps not, but it is impossible to know. I
> feel like I am trying to satisfy a target that sits in the dark
> refusing to disclose itself and changes shape whenever it seems that I
> am finally coming to understand it.

As a user of free software eager to use more secure and flexible
systems, I'd really like to see HURD become a production-grade OS. Also,
the design of the new HURD seems to open really exciting possibilities.

But the problem is that it *seems*. It is indeed not yet clear what it
will look like, and it is a bit frustrating (at least it really seems
frustrating for Jonathan, and I can tell it's frustrating for me, I
don't know for others).

The worst is that there seem no way to help, and that's probably a very
critical issue: if the design principles were eventually clearly stated,
not only Marcus and Neal could work to sketch a design, and everyone
could help verify it meets the various criteria that come from the
design principles.

Maybe it's only misunderstanding, but I feel in a similar way than
Jonathan about the issues raised by Marcus. The *seem* to appear when
the previous issue is addressed, and it looks like there's some hidden
issue behind them.

Wouldn't it be possible to change a bit the way this project works, so
that Neal and Marcus are no more bottlenecks? I'm pretty confident many
of us would be more than happy if they could give help. For sure I'm one
of those.

I'll sketch as many and as precise protocols, use cases and attack
scenarios as possible to help check a design, and I'm willing to
contribute code when either part or all of the design is ready.

Impatiently,
Pierre
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