At 9:41 -0800 3/20/00, Eduardo E. Horvath wrote:

>[2] I have experimented with using a 32-bit init on a 64-bit kernel.
>Some parts of it can be made to work.  But eventually it bombs when
>trying to issue sysctl()s.

One way that the sysctl issue can be mitigated is by using /kern more 
creatively. There is already a hierarchy of names in the sysctl(2) 
space which look either like filenames or SNMP OIDs, depending on 
your particular bent, and it strikes me that it should not be all 
that difficult to set up /kern so that those objects can be 
manipulated in a machine-independent way.

This is similar to how 8th Edition UNIX worked for lots of stuff - 
they just made things into filesystems, and "the usual tools" would 
"just work."

One objection raised to their method was that they did everything in 
ASCII (later, UTF-8), so that the kenel had to parse numbers put into 
it, and vice versa. The reply was, more or less, "our computers are 
fast enough for this cost to be cheap, and we value the simplicity 
and clarity more than efficiency in this case."

	looking for good ideas to ... borrow,

	Erik <fair@clock.org>