Hi,

a couple of people who are on this mailing list stripped from
the cc-list.

Mike Cheponis wrote:
[...]
> In sum:
> 
> 1. Dedicated swap is totally bogus in 21st century OSs

IMHO, this is depends on what you want to use your OS for.
If you use it on you desktop, maybe that's fine. But if 
you use it as a server, where hundreds of users work on
it, I don't agree.

> 2. Auto-defrag should be a low-priority background task, always running

Might make sense? I don't know. How large is the fragmentation
using ffs? I don't think it's usually worth running a daemon
cleaning it up. Might make more sense for different filesystems, though.

> 3. Fixed numbers of inodes is totally bogus in 21st century OSs

Well, if you come up with a good scheme to allocate them dynamically,
and noone comes up with any good counterarguments, we might change
it that way :-) (I am not a filesystem guru, so I don't know what
the reasons for using a fixed number of inodes are).

> 4. I should be able to have a VM system that allows me to have an array that
>    occupies all of available filesystem space if I want, and to be able to
>    manipulate that array in my userland program as if I had all of that
>    memory; after all, what the heck is a VM system for?

see above (1).

> Thanks everybody for contributing to this discussion.  As you can see,
> I have no interest in keeping unix sacred cows alive, 'cause sacred cows
> make the best burgers...onward to the 21st century unix!

I don't have any feelings about sacred cows, but I am a
vegetarian and don't eat any meat burgers :-)

  Guenther