Re: [ANN] Lunatik -- NetBSD kernel scripting with Lua (GSoC project results)

[Antti Kantee <pooka%cs.hut.fi@localhost>]

On Tue Oct 05 2010 at 18:24:48 -0300, Lourival Vieira Neto wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I'm glad to announce the results of my GSoC project this year [1].
> We've created the support for scripting the NetBSD kernel with Lua,
> which we called Lunatik and it is composed by a port of the Lua
> interpreter to the kernel, a kernel programming interface for
> extending subsystems and a user-space interface for loading user
> scripts into the kernel. You can see more details on [2]. I am
> currently working on the improvement of its implementation, on the
> documentation and on the integration between Lunatik and other
> subsystems, such as npf(9), to provide a real usage scenario.

Cool.

I'm looking forward to seeing your evaluation of real usage scenarios.
If you can find some existing policy code written in C and convert it to
lua, it would make a strong case.  The main metric I'm interested in is
convenience, and performance to some degree depending on what kind of
places your plan to put lua scripts in.  At least in the packet filter
use case the performance is quite critical.

I don't know how well the fibonacci example performs (and the performance
is not very critical there), but I'm sure you'll agree that from the
convenience pov it is a very strong case _against_ lua ;)
(yes, I realize it's not provided for demonstrating convenience)

  - antti