[movitz-devel] Re: Suggested "filesystem"

[Frode Vatvedt Fjeld]

It seems to me that for a general purpose OS, one really needs to
think hard about the relationship between persistent and transient
structures. I mean, the naive model for persitence in a lisp system is
to say (dump-world-image), and boot or load that image later. (Much
like the "hibernate" operation on laptops.) In contrast there's unix,
with its millions of config-files whose contents determine the
persistent system state, and windows which also has the registry as a
slightly more principled approach. LispOS also needs more fine-grained
control over what's persistent and what's not, i.e. someting akin to
the registry. One needs to be able to say "load/save the system's
_configuration_", as opposed to its entire state, and this perhaps
implies that programmers need to be able to express that e.g. some
entitiy is part of the system's configuration. For example, consider
some method on a system-standard gf that provides some
configuration-specific specialization. One might save the defmethod
form, or the method meta-object, or something else. Well, I suppose
many of these questions will sort themselves out as a system is in
fact built.

Which brings me to my second point, which is that if someone was to
write a simple interface to the IDE disk drives (that primarily works
with bochs), this would be an excellent starting-point for actually
experimenting with these concepts. I don't want to come across as
whining, but I have to say I'm slightly disappointed so far when it
comes to the apparent disinterest in contributing code (or even just
bug/feature-reports) here. Hopefully this might change when the
platform becomes more mature, but obviously contributions from others
would speed up this process also, and not to mention increase the
chances of removing bad design decisions of mine before they are
embedded to deep in the system.

-- 
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld