Userapi, Reflection

[Galen Sampson]

All,

   I have been contemplating how the useapi portion of the project will work
(for those not farmiliar please see
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/Goals/userapi.cgi).  What I think would be quite
impressive would be a process that uses reflection (java and c#).  Reflection
is an api that allows for the creation of types, functions, and classes at run
time.  Please see http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/reflect/index.html
for information how java does this.
   The idea for userapi would be to use reflection to create callable
prototypes for systemcalls at run time.  Say we have our special user level
process that handles system calls.  It is invoked by the kernel like init.  It
will have a configuration file, containing prototypes for every system call it
knows how to handle.  If linux changes a prototype for one of their system
calls, the configuration file could be modified accordingly.  On a SIGHUP the
process would re-read the configuration file, and modify the prototypes
accordingly.   The idea is that you could modify, add, and delete system calls
at runtime, without ever rebooting the os or modifying any code at all.
   This is just a thought I had.  It is possible that it is infeasible, but I
thought I would throw the idea out there and see what other might think of it.

Regards,
Galen Sampson

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