Re: Suggested "filesystem"
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld <[email protected]> Tue, 13 Apr 2004 11:37:17 +0200
| Newsgroups | gmane.lisp.movitz.devel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
It seems to me that for a general purpose OS, one really needs to think hard about the relationship between persistent and transient structures. I mean, the naive model for persitence in a lisp system is to say (dump-world-image), and boot or load that image later. (Much like the "hibernate" operation on laptops.) In contrast there's unix, with its millions of config-files whose contents determine the persistent system state, and windows which also has the registry as a slightly more principled approach. LispOS also needs more fine-grained control over what's persistent and what's not, i.e. someting akin to the registry. One needs to be able to say "load/save the system's _configuration_", as opposed to its entire state, and this perhaps implies that programmers need to be able to express that e.g. some entitiy is part of the system's configuration. For example, consider some method on a system-standard gf that provides some configuration-specific specialization. One might save the defmethod form, or the method meta-object, or something else. Well, I suppose many of these questions will sort themselves out as a system is in fact built. Which brings me to my second point, which is that if someone was to write a simple interface to the IDE disk drives (that primarily works with bochs), this would be an excellent starting-point for actually experimenting with these concepts. I don't want to come across as whining, but I have to say I'm slightly disappointed so far when it comes to the apparent disinterest in contributing code (or even just bug/feature-reports) here. Hopefully this might change when the platform becomes more mature, but obviously contributions from others would speed up this process also, and not to mention increase the chances of removing bad design decisions of mine before they are embedded to deep in the system. -- Frode Vatvedt Fjeld