9 Feb
2021
9 Feb
'21
11:21 a.m.
On 2/8/21, M Douglas McIlroy <m.douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
How many of roughly 500 system calls (to say nothing of uncounted
ioctl's) do you think are necessary for writing those few crucial
capabilities that distinguish Linux from v7? There is
undeniably bloat, but only a sliver of it contributes to the
distinctive utility of today's systems.
Or consider this. Unix grew by about 39 system calls in its first
decade, but an average of 40
per decade ever since. Is this accelerated growth more symptomatic of
maturity or of cancer?
Doug
I'd say probably the latter. There's no good reason I can see for the
proliferation of system calls. It should be possible to write a system
where everything truly is a file, and reduce the actual primitives to
basically just (variants of) read() and write(), with absolutely
everything else (even other file APIs such as open()/close())
implemented on top of those. That's my plan for UX/RT. Extreme
minimalism of primitives should make things more manageable,
especially as far as access control and extensibility go.