Re: Anybody working on removing sendmail from base?

[Mike Porter <mupi@xxxxxxxxx>]

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On Thursday 02 October 2003 12:35 am, Matthew Dillon wrote:

>     The biggest question is how to store the variables.  Storing them in
>     kernel memory is my prefered solution so the substitutions can be done
>     simply, without adding any significant complexity to the kernel.
>

the downside I see to useing kernel memory is hte question of just how much 
memory the structures will take. In a system where 100 or 1000 processes 
could be running at once, if each of those has a varsym table for it, and 
there are 3 versions of perl and 3 versions of gcc installed, we are going to 
be using a good chunk of  memory.  even if each layer only stores 'overrides' 
from the previous layer, there may only be 5 users, and there would only be 
one system table..you are still talking a decent chunk of memory real estate.

Also, isn't the idea of variant symlinks to make things dependent on the 
environment?  It seems the idea you have discussed makes for having to use a 
different way to set such things.  Question: can't we simply parse the 
environment from namei() if a varsym is found, or would this incurr too great 
a performance hit? (in other words, if we find a ${mta} we search the 
enviroment for $MTA, which would have been set globally by /etc/rc.d/mail (or 
overriden by .login or something), but if we don't find a ${ in the path, we 
treat it normally?  Or am I missing something (which should be) obvious?

mike
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