Re: 2.3.x wish list?

[Tim Smith]

Why not make the encryption handled by a separate module.  The standard
kernel could include a module that does something no one could possibly
object to (e.g., rot-13).  If even that won't get past France's laws,
then make the standard encryption module just be a pass through.

People who want stronger encryption can then replace just that module,
without having to rebuild their kernels.

Speaking of this, it brings up something I've wondered about.  How flexible
and modular is the Linux I/O system compared to NT?  On NT, you can stick a
"filter driver" basically anywhere you want--at the high level system call
level, on top of a specific filesystem, before a specific block driver, etc.
A filter driver (or pretty much any other kind of driver) is also given
great flexibility in how it deals with requests.  Besides the normal method
(talk to hardware), it can talk to any other driver, or even do higher level
things, like open, close, read, and write files--it can even start kernel
threads.  Everything in the I/O system seems to be fully reentrant, and
all the locking is fine grained enough that you don't run into deadlocks
like you do on most other systems.  (E.g., on Windows 95 or 98, or on the
Mac, if you try to file I/O from a disk driver, you lock up quickly.  You
can do file I/O from a CD-ROM driver on Windows, though, but not on the Mac).
Essentially, drivers in NT are like little applications that happen to
be running as part of the kernel.

--Tim Smith

On Fri, 14 May 1999, Graffiti wrote:
> Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 00:53:49 -0700
> From: Graffiti <[e-mail]>
> To: [e-mail]
> Cc: [e-mail], [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: 2.3.x wish list?
> 
> On Thu, May 13, 1999 at 07:21:51AM -0400, [e-mail] wrote:
> > 	   It is, and betas will appear soon for 2.2.* kernels.
> > 	   It will *never* be part of the standard kernel, because
> > 	   US Government thinks that encryption is equal to munitions..	
> > 
> > 40-bit encryption isn't.  Why not just put 40 bit as the default
> > in the kernel, but require patching to get any higher.
> 
> Did France change their laws regarding crypto?  Otherwise, you can't even
> put 40-bit encryption into the kernel.  Unless you want to make sure
> French users need to get registered with thier government before using
> Linux.
> 
> > 
> >    >  - ext2 is showing its age on larger partitions; my 3 9 gig drives
> >    >    take about a half hour to fsck, and up to a minute just to mount.
> > 
> > 	   ftp://mea.tmt.tele.fi/linux/LFS/
> > 
> > Thanks.  Is there any concensus on which filesystem is "next" after
> > ext2?  There was lots of talk about the reiser fs for example...
> 
> Yeah, whatever works. :-)
> 
> -- DN
> P.S. are bigfoot & earthlink addresses still blocked?  those are about
> my only "stable" email addresses...
> 
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