Random comments ...

[shenson@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Stephen Henson)]

Couple of comments ...
I think if security is ever going to be less than a joke the cookie searching
by the library needs to be replaced. After all security isn't mch good if
the lowliest process can access supervisor mode.
I'd like any interrupt driven hard disk handler to use something like:
Rwabs(...usual parameters..., func). where transfer is in th ebackround
and func() is called on completion. This way as much as possible is open
to 'tweeking' and the risk of it not doing what you want due to proprietary
restrictions etc is minimised.
	My mention of character/block special files was mainly as some method
of identifying devices and a more coherent interface to the things. Only a
suggestion, I wasn't offering to rewrite the kernel :-)
	Yes I hate having to kludge round buggy proprietary software too, but
alas I haven;t any choice.
Steve.