Welcome

["Nymia" <Nymia@uswest.net> writes:]

>I downloaded the latest (1.6.6) and was able to boot it using grub.

Cool! Glad it worked OK for you.

>No major problems encountered so far. That's because I haven't tried running
>MGR yet and played around the filesystem.
>
>I was wondering if anybody would give some comments or opinions about
>application servers. From what I gathered, BeOS and AtheOS has application
>servers and it seems to work very well in that environment. Would an
>application server be good on the VSTa environment as well?

I don't know what an application server is. Or, rather, I can imagine this
in a web farm environment, but not how it relates back to basic OS
mechanisms.

>I was also thinking about about loopers and (un)lockers. Does VSTa have a
>mechanism of locking a resource? And loopers for processes or threads that
>continuously loop for events/messages?

There are IPC primitives which are used to implement an event loop for a
server. There are spinlocks, and also a semaphore server, and also a simple
P/V mutex mechanism for use between threads.

Recall that in VSTa, the kernel doesn't have much to do with resources
(except for CPU cycles and memory bytes in their rawest form). Each server
is accessed as a filesystem, and represents its services (and their
underlying resourcse) as file nodes within this hierarchy. There's a bunch
of protocol which exists by convention between filesystem servers and their
clients... but this framework is very extensible, especially the FS_STAT and
FS_WSTAT messages for reading and initiating actions on attributes of
filesystem objects.

You may want to read the code for a simple filesystem, like the semaphore
one or perhaps the RAM-based /tmp filesystem. They're in /vsta/src/srv, and
/tmp in particular is pretty representative of how a server acts as a
filesystem.

Regards,
Andy Valencia
Received on Thu Feb 1 22:01:23 2001