Fixing Posix semaphores

[Kamal R. Prasad]

--- Joe Kelsey <joe at zircon.seattle.wa.us> wrote:

> I have a desire to fix posix semaphores in at least
> 5.3.  The current
> implementation doesn't actually follow the "spirit"
> of the standard,
> even though it technically qualifies in a somewhat
> degraded sense.  I
> refer to the fact that the current implementation
> treats posix
> semaphores as completely contained inside the kernel
> and essentially
> divorced from the filesystem.  The true "spirit" of
> the standard places
> the semaphores directly in the file system, similar
> to named pipes.
> However the current implementation treats the
> supplied "name" as a
> 14-character identifier, required to begin with a
> slash and contain no
> other slashes.  Pretty weak.
> 
> Well, in order to fix this, we need to add file
> system code and come up
> with a new type.  

>From the opengroup website:-

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7990989775/xsh/sem_open.html

"It is unspecified whether the name appears in the
file system and is visible to functions that take
pathnames as arguments. "

>I currently have some time to
> spend on something like
> this and am willing to put in whatever effort it
> takes.  Does anyone
> want to add their own ideas or requirements?
> 

You need to allow the user to provide a fully
qualified pathname as an argument -and if the
implementation doesn't allow that, that would be a
BUG. But requiring the supplied name to be a valid
pathname is not mandated by the std. BTW -how would
you deal with a diskless workstation running Freebsd?
regards
-kamal



		
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