Xref: utzoo comp.unix.wizards:6022 comp.arch:3089
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ncr-sd!greg
From: greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.arch
Subject: Re: Jerry Pournelle on UNIX (From BYTE)
Message-ID: <1972@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 8 Jan 88 21:24:16 GMT
References: <1495@osiris.UUCP> <2126@haddock.ISC.COM> <1497@osiris.UUCP>
Reply-To: greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel)
Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo
Lines: 18

In article <17309@topaz.rutgers.edu> ron@topaz.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) writes:
>CD ROM roots would be bad because CD ROM's are blindingly slow.

Currently true.  But don't take the current state-of-the-art as an intrinsic
limit.  They'll get faster.

>A write protected root is easy, we built such a system at BRL but
>after we did it we couldn't find anything good to use it for.

Yes, a write-protected root is a trivial one-line change to the kernel.  But
that's not what we were considering; it still needs to have the functionality
of a normal root -- that is, all the things in /etc could still be "updated,"
for example; but how this could be done is not clear.  The Air Force kernel
moved all modifiable files off the root file system, but it was a maintenance
nightmare to keep track of all the programs that knew about the modifiable
files and fix them every time there was a new release.
-- 
-- Greg Noel, NCR Rancho Bernardo   Greg.Noel@SanDiego.NCR.COM  or  greg@ncr-sd