Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Librarifying the Kernel
Hajime Tazaki wanted to decouple the kernel network stack from the kernel and run it as a shared library. He posted a patch to do this. If accepted, anyone would then be able to replace the network stack with a home-rolled version. The code, however, got a mixed reception on the linux-kernel mailing list.
Richard Weinberger objected that there might be too many similarities between Hajime's project and user-mode Linux (UML). If Hajime could retool his library to be part of the UML code, that would avoid having multiple user-mode-type parts of the kernel.
Hajime pointed out that one of the goals with his kernel stack work was for the shared library to work on any POSIX-compatible operating system (e.g., OS X), so he didn't want to rely too heavily on Linux-specific implementation details.
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