Re: Split Capabilities: Making Capabilities Scale Jonathan S. Shapiro (shap@eros-os.org)
Sat, 8 Jul 2000 21:35:32 -0400

> Lazy creation is a good idea, but if you're talking about objects with a
> long lifetime, such as files, you'll eventually end up creating all or
> almost all of the capabilities.

In my previous comments on this, I failed to make something clear.

In the course of it's lifespan, every file in a file system will at some time have a read-write capability to it. At some point, most of these become unreferenced and could in principle be forgotten. This is why I was asking about "dropping" capabilities in the previous mail.

Alternatively, we can imagine these capabilities as being "out of cache". The cost of refabricating capabilities that (statistically) will never be used goes rapidly to zero....

This is why I don't think the argument "they will all exist eventually" is compelling. It seems to me like a cacheing problem, and I am probably failing to see something in the e-Speak design that makes this sort of approach undesirable.

shap