From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 13:44:19 -1000 From: Tim Newsham To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] some light reading In-Reply-To: <607e471abba07903c9f90659e4cf9625@plan9.ucalgary.ca> Message-ID: References: <607e471abba07903c9f90659e4cf9625@plan9.ucalgary.ca> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Topicbox-Message-UUID: d63f9f92-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > "Developing Simple and Efficient Package System using Union Mounts": [...] > check the comments too -- seems like 2000 binds would be 'very > inefficient'... This has been discussed a number of times in VSTa circles (and I'm sure elsewhere). Yes, it is inefficient, but no more so than if you have a shell which searches $PATH each time it runs a command. If the shell caches the lookups you can tradeoff some space for some time, of course. I'm not familiar with the mount point searching code in plan9, but I bet part of the inefficiency you are seeing is just because the code wasn't written with large mount tables in mind. All that is going on here is that the search mechanism is being removed from several ad-hoc places (shell $PATH, dynamic loader LD_LIBRARY_PATH, man $MANPATH, etc) and being pushed down into a general mechanism in the kernel (or elsewhere in some operating systems). I think its a good idea. Of course I doubt the BSD or linux crowd would follow this up by removing the various ad-hoc search mechanisms (partially because namespaces arent customizable on a per-user basis, and partially because they tend to add features, not remove them). > andrey Tim N.