What new system calls do you want in BSD?

David B Stewart dstewart at fas.ri.cmu.edu
Tue Feb 6 07:17:43 AEST 1990


How about implementing good ol' semaphores, with a much simpler interface
than Sys V.  I've written a front end to Sys V semaphores (under SunOS x.x)
which give me the good old classical P() and V() operations.  
I don't need all that other stuff associated with Sys V.  Why not provide a 
simple system call, which works just as described in all those operating system 
textbooks.  The same goes with shared memory; if BSD 4.4 doesn't have 
lightweight processes with shared memory, then provide some sort of system call
to allow processes to establish shared memory segments.

Another useful call would be peek(address) which will return 1 if
address is legal within the processes address space, or 0 (i.e. error)
if a write/read operation to that address would cause a bus error or
segmentation fault.  I know that the SunOS kernel provides that routine,
but there is no way for the user to access it.

~dave
-- 
David B. Stewart, Dept. of Elec. & Comp. Engr., and The Robotics Institute, 
	Carnegie Mellon University,  email: stewart at faraday.ece.cmu.edu 
The following software is now available; ask me for details
        CHIMERA II, A Real-time OS for Sensor-Based Control Applications



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