David, > So all of you userland control-plane fanatics, how will you handle > things like NFS root with these daemon-required variants of NDISC and > ARP?
Do it in the initial ramdisk, we only need the daemon to setup the NDISC entries to talk to the NFS server. :-) There is obviously a cost associated with this, a deployment cost. But there are additional factors we must consider. In a later e-mail you state that Linux is a generic purpose operating system; how many users need to boot from a NFS root (besides myself :-)? I think that we must take into consideration that currently Linux is used in lots of distinct environments, not only Desktop computers, and servers, but also smaller devices. Configuration/Flexibility vs. optimization is something that varies a lot depending on the deployment you are talking about, and in most of my scenarios, a small mobile device isn't required at the moment to push 100Mbps (optimization) but must be capable of verifying it's peers and maintaining secure connections (flexibility). So, let's be generic? I might have some cycles during the month to code up something in this direction, at least for an initial review, i'll try to do so. Also, the reliability of a system depends on a lot of things, but please, let's not use the assumption that because everything sits in the kernel, it will be stable as the number of 'points of failure' is smaller; this is only true as long as people work to have stable components -- and this is independent of where the components sit. A few kernel versions ago (2.6.8 if i remember correctly) i couldn't even remove a used network interface safely from the system without hanging the network stack. It is possible to have stable user-space code, if people developing it work to and make sure it is stable. Hugo
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