Re: Anybody working on removing sendmail from base?

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    I really do think that we will be able to use some sort of VFS layering
    feature to deal with default compiler selection and things like that.
    Don't think of it so much as actually creating a VFS, instead think of it
    as an abstraction many forms of which can be optimized down to a few
    permanent entries in the namecache.  The /etc/rc* system would set up
    the entries when the system boots and they could also be changed at run
    time.  

    Then consider the ability to 'stack' the abstraction ('stack' virtualized
    VFS layers) to create environments.  e.g. user A might want GCC3.2 as
    the default while user B might want GCC2.95.4.

    Now, if you can picture all of that, go back to the idea of a VFS
    'process' running in userland, but then consider that all such a process
    really has to do is manage entries in the namecache and would only be
    messaged when the kernel can't find the request in the cache.  We still
    wind up with almost 100% the performance that we would have with the
    underlying native filesystem.

    Anything we can do within the kernel's namecache is basically going to be
    freebee from a performance standpoint.

						-Matt