Re^2: What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?

[Maarten Litmaath]

vsh at etnibsd.UUCP (Steve Harris) writes:
\In article <1549 at salgado.Solbourne.COM> dworkin at Solbourne.com (Dieter Muller) writes:
\>I'd *really* like a sane tty driver.
\
\Hear hear!!  At a former job we talked a lot about how we would rewrite
\the tty driver.  One idea was to give the user, via ioctl's, access to
\the uart (or whatever serial-line multiplexer you have).  One ioctl to
\get the uart settings (in a bit vector), another to set them, and
\another to have the driver(??) send you a signal (for which you would
\have to write the appropriate handler) whenever any of the bits changed
\(e.g., DTR was deasserted).  Standard configurations (handlers) would
\be privided in a library.  Of course, one would be limited by the
\capabilities of the uart, but the design would assume total access to
\be possible.

But is this going to take care of the `vi crashed, terminal screwed up'
problem?

\A second idea is "copy-on-write symbolic links" -- I have a symlink:
\	bar -> foo
\When I write to it, a regular file "bar" is created (the symlink is
\destroyed), the contents of foo (up to the current file-pointer-offset)
\are copied to bar, and the write takes place.  I'm not sure what
\happens if foo is not a regular file.

That's easy: a kernel panic! (Ala `date > /dev/printer'.)
Seriously: what would you use them for?
-- 
   "... a lap-top Cray-2 with builtin    |Maarten Litmaath @ VU Amsterdam:
cold fusion power supply"  (Colin Dente) |maart at cs.vu.nl, mcvax!botter!maart