[openbeos] Re: Cosmoe is back
- From: "François Revol" <revol@xxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:51:24 +0100 CET
>
> On Feb 7, 2007, at 3:49 PM, Niklas Nisbeth wrote:
>
> > I trust you did this out of necessity and not out of ill will
> > towards
> > the BSD community.
>
> I'd love for it to work on other UNIX platforms.
>
> The reality is that to support certain Be functionality, you have to
> pick a technology to emulate it. For example: for node watching, we
> use inotify; for attributes we use fsetxattr et al.; for getting and
> setting system parameters we use the /proc filesystem interface. On
> *BSD, these are either not available at all, or not all the same
> features are available. There may be other technologies available on
> these platform, but then someone has to do the work twice. I'm glad
> for someone to work on these sorts of things, but at this stage of
> getting things off the ground, it just can't really be me.
For some stuff you can use standard libraries.
like there is a library for xattrs that should work in BSD as well (and
OSX).
As for inotify, BSD has kevents or something...
Also, something BSD has that I do'nt think Linux has is the ability to
open a file from a reference (node_ref in BeOS) BSD has some node ID
stuff (16 byte identifier, can probably stuff a BFS inode inside).
Linux cannot do that because it enforces walking a path before opening
a file, as it maintains dentries to keep inode relationships. At least
last time I checked.
That's why the Haiku build tools in linux have to fake _kopen_vnode_()
or so by keeping around a list of already known vnodes IIRC.
About /proc, well it's just another way around sysctl() you know.
Not that sysctl() itself is really standard anyway...
François.
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