Call for Opionings

[pedz at smu.UUCP]

Two questions looking for your opionings.  Please mail responses
to me directly and I will post them.

First:  I get the general feeling that Berkeley is thinking
about implementing (or perhaps has already done so) a virtual
termianal system.  I am not sure what they want to do but here
is what I am thinking about doing.  Basically take a termcap and
curses type implementation and put them down into the kernel.
Instead of making system calls, there would be a set of escape
sequences which could be used to position the cursor, add lines,
delete lines, insert characters, etc.  These commands would be
interpreted and then the real sequence of commands would be sent
out by the kernels code.  You are probably asking "why do this".
Well, it would seem to me that it would utilize the physical
memory better.  If there is more than one program that uses some
type of terminal cursor control package running at a particular
time, then there is as many copies of the code to do cursor
positioning in the memory someplace.  There are also many
advantages to this type of system.  Basically since the code is
already there, programmers would be much more likely to go ahead
and do the proper things on the screen where in some cases, they
simply dont bother.  Also, such things as tabs and so forth
could always be handeled properly.  So the question is, what do
you think about putting this much code into the kernel.
Obviously this is only intended for computers with large physical
memories.

Second: I recently wrote a "more" type program with the added
feature of being able to move forward and backward through the
file.  The first few versions of the program simply kept an
index of the file and then did seeks when the person wanted to
go backwards.  The last version I wrote simply keeps all of the
lines "in memory".  Note that we have a Vax with virtual memory.
Thus the question is, which is better: doing random accesses on
a disk file or doing random accesses in the virtual memory swap
space?

Perry
convex!smu!pedz
pedz at smu  (csnet)