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Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2002 11:09:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
To: Kai Henningsen <kaih@khms.westfalen.de>
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Subject: Re: [PATCH] Futex Asynchronous Interface
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On 9 Jun 2002, Kai Henningsen wrote:
>
> However, I don't think that's all that important. What I'd rather see is
> making the network devices into namespace nodes. The situation of eth0 and
> friends, from a Unix perspective, is utterly unnatural.

But what would you _do_ with them? What would be the advantage as compared
to the current situation?

Now, to configure a device, you get a fd to the device the same way you
get a fd _anyway_ - with "socket()".

And anybody who says that "socket()" is utterly unnatural to the UNIX way
is quite far out to lunch. It may be unnatural to the Plan-9 way of
"everything is a namespace", but that was never the UNIX way. The UNIX way
is "everything is a file descriptor or a process", but that was never
about namespaces.

Yes, some old-timers could argue that original UNIX didn't have sockets,
and that the BSD interface is ugly and an abomination and that it _should_
have been a namespace thing, but that argument falls flat on its face when
you realize that the "pipe()" system call _was_ in original UNIX, and has
all the same issues.

Don't get hung up about names.

			Linus

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