On Fri, 14 May 1999, Lennart Augustsson wrote:

>> Mike Cheponis wrote:
>> Gentlemen, we simply -must- break out of this 20th-century unix box we've
>> been living in and re-evaluate how to make our beloved OS the winner in
>> the 21st century!
> 
> Well, the beauty of open source is that you don't have to wait for
> it, just do it yourself.  When your implementation is done we will,
> of course, consider it for inclusion in NetBSD.

>         -- Lennart

Lennart, thanks for your comments.

One of the reasons for bringing this up on this forum is that the people
on this list are some of the brightest and most experienced unix people
in the world.

I've been bugged by this limit preventing me from running huge userland
programs (datasets as big as disk) for 20 years, since I was kernel hacking
on VAX-11/780s at CMU (surprise, collecting big datasets in the kernel).

----

So, by making a proposal on this list, I hoped that the wise and bright
people here would shoot holes in my proposal, and I'd learn where I was
right and where I needed to think more, because as you know, just having
a simple idea and actually seeing it running in code is often a long distance.

----

But the -other- reason to float the ideas here is to get a general
concensus "blessing" that something like this makes sense and, if it were
implemented well, it would be included in a future kernel.

And you know the reason this is important, I'm sure:  Given the recent 
Linux USB mess, where Inaky spent a lot of time working on his implementation
only to have Linus start from scratch!  Now it's Linus's USB only.

[ Incidentally, thank you kindly for your USB implementation, I think it's
  quite nice, indeed, and I guess I just don't understand the Linux guys'
  need to reinvent the wheel. ]

-mac