[coyotos-dev] Hi + some stuff I found researching

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 20:00 -0400, Haplo wrote:
> I mainly  
> suggested it in the hopes that there might be some room for  
> opportunistic optimization with it, but that turns out not to be the  
> case.

Yes. And I don't really want to discourage you. I think that the right
response here is: let's get something that works and then see if (a)
there are places where this type of technique would make sense and (b)
the risk of introducing it is acceptable.

> > Litmus test question: if you implemented an algorithm like this, how
> > soon would you run it on your (personal) defibrilator?
> 
> Well, assuming that it ran a general purpose KOS like coyotos, I  
> still don't have a personal defibrillator.
> Hypothetically, however, most likely never. In a single-purpose  
> system like that most kernel paths would be entirely unused, and I  
> can't think of anything in such a system
> which would utilize that. To be fair, though, coyotos IS a general  
> purpose OS kernel, so there will be features exclusively used by one  
> application or the other.

Sure, but that wasn't my point. We have a commit rule on the Coyotos
code base that is carried forward from EROS: code doesn't go in to the
main tree unless the person making the commit is willing to bet their
life on it being right.

We fail, of course, but it helps explain what the level of confidence
needs to be. Coyotos actually *is* about to go into surgical
instruments, so it's not just a joke.

shap