Re: ANNOUNCE: Linux Kernel ORB: kORBit

[Chris Lattner <sabre nondot org>]

> > I do have one sensible question. Given that corba is while flexible a 
> > relatively expensive encoding system, wouldn't it be better to keep corba
> > out of kernel space and talk something which is a simple and cleaner encoding

> p9fs exists.  I didn't see these patches since August, but probably I can poke
> Roman into porting it to the current tree.  9P is quite simple and unlike
> CORBA it had been designed for taking kernel stuff to userland.  Besides,
> authors definitely understand UNIX...

One thing that you might want to mention Alexander: 9P is not a general
communications protocol.  In fact, it doesn't work very well across the
internet at all.  To get decent performance, the Plan9 group (which, is a
very cool group.  :) has to specify a new protocol that competes with TCP
on the level of complexity (IL: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/il/il.html)

Also, 9P is a general communications framework only in the context of
Plan9 itself.  In reality it only applys directly/well to filesystem
related issues... the reason it works well in Plan9 is that _everything_
is a file (part of the beauty of plan9).  

With some elbow grease, 9P could probably be made to work in the kORBit
framework.  It's not even that big of a deal: it just takes time.  Believe
me when I say that IIOP is not a very good user->kernel communications
mechanism.  :)

-Chris

http://www.nondot.org/~sabre/os/
http://www.nondot.org/MagicStats/
http://korbit.sourceforge.net/