Linus Torvalds <torvalds_at_transmeta.com> writes:

> > Will you consider this mini patch which gives us "newpag" and "getpag"
> > system calls, implemented by the students cc'd above?  It puts an extra
> > unsigned long in the process structure and defines two mini syscalls and
> > an entry in the /proc/status output.
> 
> Not for 2.2. I don't feel comfortable adding new features like this.

I'm writing the kernel module for the free AFS client arla, and this
patch would be very welcome for me, since the current way of doing this
is awful. It would also provide a standard interface for setting and
getting the pags, as well as a standard place to store the pag.

Currently, I use the two first fields of the groups array in the task struct
and I set these to numbers not expected to be real group numbers. This looks
like this in a 'groups' output:

33536 32547 usr

This is how it must be done in most Unices, there are exceptions, like AIX.
It would be nice if Linux could set the standard in this matter. If it
isn't included in 2.2, it would take long before normal Linux users could
use AFS and Coda (as well as other file systems and ACL systems) in a
decent way.

We want a unified interface.

Magnus Ahltorp
map_at_stacken.kth.se