Re: centralized auth and nsswitch.conf

[Peter da Silva <peter-dragonfly@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     The actual communication might occur through a unix domain
>     socket, but the abstraction almost certainly should use 
>     messages and ports for maximum flexibility.

I'm missing something here.

The underlying communication mechanism is LWKT in the kernel.

UserAPI communicates with the kernel through a LWKT-compatible gate.

UserAPI uses LWKT messages as its own intermediate abstractions.

So, this would mean taking a LWKT message, encapsulating it into
something that can be passed over a stream, taking that stream
and encapsulating it into a LWKT message, and then passing it
into the kernel and finally back to the receiving application
where it's unpacked back to a stream and then to the encapsulated
LWKT message.

I see a real use for the ability to talk more directly from one
user context to another using LWKT messages, presumably by
specifying a different message port (fd?) in the 0x81 syscall.