What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?

[John F. Haugh II]

In article <4357 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>I've been thinking about this statement, but it still does not make any sense.
>If you do a read or write that does not span block boundaries it should be
>atomic. So a binary read or write that's a power of two bytes in length should
>have no problem. Certainly I don't think I've ever seen a problem with utmp.
>
>Or with directories, for that matter... which after all are just files with
>16-byte records in them (except for on BSD, and I think they still don't
>cross block boundaries).

One very important difference.  namei() returns a pointer to a LOCKED
inode.  The modification to the directory is very atomic, whereas the
modification to a regular file is not.  The file is not locked automagically
as is the case with directories.
-- 
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