From: utzoo!decvax!cca!Michael.Young@CMU-CS-A@sri-unix
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Re: How about VMS-style protection?
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.4759
Posted: Thu Dec  9 06:22:26 1982
Received: Fri Dec 10 20:36:54 1982

From: Michael Wayne Young <Michael.Young@CMU-CS-A>
Date:  4 December 1982 1943-EST (Saturday)
Putting more than one set of group bits in is nice, but
how many groups?  This suffers from the same sort of loss
of generality as 4.2BSD's allowing you to be in N groups
(for some fixed N).  [Allowing any number of groups (with
a data structure similar to clist {like a "chunked array"})
would be nice: still you're limited to the number of
groups you can login/newgrp to anyway (because only those
things would give you new groups in your list anyhow).]

I think perhaps a better solution would be the creation 
of a "file daemon" at this point.  Something like what
Tops-10 has.  I don't exactly like the Tops-10 approach,
but the idea of a file daemon (which could also support
neat things like password-protected files, among other
goodies) is nice.  I've thought long and hard on it, but
haven't been able to come up with a reasonable implementation
of it for a Unix system though.  Anyone else
have any good ideas?
The new 4.2BSD IPC ought to make a file daemon a little
easier to deal with too.  Taking hairy protection computations
out of the kernel (for special cases only; not simple
accesses) may be well worth its while.

			Michael