limits

[Moderator, John Quarterman]

Date: Sun, 17 Nov 85 16:28:42 PST
From: seismo!sun!gorodish!guy (Guy Harris)

> I support the idea of making the limits available at run-time, but
> let's not copy Berkeley's naming (getdlimit or whatever it is).  There
> should be just *one* call that gets all the limits into a struct;
> Berkeley compatability can be achieved with "wrapper" routines.

I wanted to make sure nobody introduced a routine to get the size of
the descriptor table with the same semantics as 4.2BSD's, but with a
different name.

> UniSoft has already done 90% of the work of this call by moving
> everything that used to be in param.h into a structure named 'v'.  This
> was done so that binary customers could patch NPROC et al easily, but a
> system call that returned the contents of 'v' would be trivial to add.
> Maybe we could get AT&T to buy the changes (they're extensive) from UniSoft.

You've got it backwards here.  The PWB/UNIX group at AT&T invented
the "v" structure; a lot of PWB/UNIX stuff, including the "v"
structure, made it into UNIX/TS 1.0 and subsequent releases from the
USG/USDL including S3 and S5.  UniSoft already bought that code from
AT&T, so there's no need to get AT&T to buy it back.

Volume-Number: Volume 3, Number 31