Meta: explain what where when? (was Re: userland access to devices is moving!)

From: Matthew D. Fuller (fullermd_at_over-yonder.net)
Date: 06/18/03

  • Next message: Poul-Henning Kamp: "Re: Meta: explain what where when? (was Re: userland access to devices is moving!)" 
    Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 14:00:32 -0500
To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>

    On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 08:42:14PM +0200 I heard the voice of
    Poul-Henning Kamp, and lo! it spake thus:
    > In message <20030618174733.GC10127@over-yonder.net>, "Matthew D. Fuller" writes:
    > >
    > >Speaking as somebody whose reach of mailing lists notably exceeds his
    > >grasp (as it always should be; otherwise what fun is it?), I often find
    > >myself a little in the dark on what these sort of things really /mean/ to
    > >the system in the end, and I think it would be a nice extension of these
    > >sort of posts/proposals to have a sentence of summary, along the lines
    > >of:
    >
    > Well, what can I say but: "You're right".
    >
    > I do on the other hand not think that emails to arch@ is the best forum
    > for the in-depth explanations.

    Oh, absolutely! And to understand an in-depth explanation, I'd have to
    dig into the code anyway to understand it.

    I was aiming more at a throwaway statement like, "This will clean up a
    lot of code and make it easier to understand and debug," or "This
    straightens out the code structure and let us add more things onto it
    more easily," or "This will improve performance for things that do a lot
    of grubbing to /dev nodes. Your dump(8) will run 3% faster." That last
    is actually more specific than I have in mind. No guarantee, just a
    general statement of direction. From my armchair, it's fairly easy to
    give a "75% cleanup, 20% architecture, 5% performance" 3-axis guesstimate
    of how this moves us forward, and even such a general direction is an
    enormous aid to those of us who don't really understand where this plugs
    into the system.

    Reading the discussion of this change, I'd say "This is a structural
    cleanup that eliminates some complexity and makes it easier to understand
    and add onto, with the 'cleanup' features related to the reduced
    complexity. It may also yield a small real-world performance improvement
    for things that do a lot of /dev/* fiddling." Just a thumbnail sketch of
    whether this is moving us down the path, or hacking out thorns that are
    keeping us from moving down the path, etc.

    > The "blueprint" articles which I am trying to restart in DĉmonNews
    > may not be either, but I think they are more the right kind of
    > forum for it. I am still warming up to the article format, and the
    > amount of feedback so far has not really given me any feel for how
    > complex issues I can tackle without the readers just skipping the
    > article.

    That's an interesting way to go, and certainly something worthwhile.
    Poking at the site now, I see the one from May on userland/kernel
    interfaces; has there been more? 

    -- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd@over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
"The only reason I'm burning my candle at both ends, is because I
      haven't figured out how to light the middle yet"
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