centralized auth and nsswitch.conf

[Peter da Silva]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
    The actual communication might occur through a unix domain
    socket, but the abstraction almost certainly should use 
    messages and ports for maximum flexibility.
I'm missing something here.

The underlying communication mechanism is LWKT in the kernel.

UserAPI communicates with the kernel through a LWKT-compatible gate.

UserAPI uses LWKT messages as its own intermediate abstractions.

So, this would mean taking a LWKT message, encapsulating it into
something that can be passed over a stream, taking that stream
and encapsulating it into a LWKT message, and then passing it
into the kernel and finally back to the receiving application
where it's unpacked back to a stream and then to the encapsulated
LWKT message.
I see a real use for the ability to talk more directly from one
user context to another using LWKT messages, presumably by
specifying a different message port (fd?) in the 0x81 syscall.