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Re: Re: Any shell available?


On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 06:02:28PM -0700, Anthony Tonizzo wrote:
> Andrew:
> 
> >Now eCos has no concept of loading a program from secondary storage
> >and executing it. It has no concept of a program. It has no concept of
> >a process.
> 
> I am not sure I agree 100% with this statement.
> 
> eCos has both the concept of file system (and hence we can extrapolate
> the concept of secondary storage) as well as the concept of process, given
> that a process can be loaded by the objloader package and executed.

I did wounder if anybody would bring up the objloader packege.

Yes, we have a filesystem. However we don't have processes. 

We have threads, but not processes. To me there is a big
difference. For one, a process has resource management associated to
it. If a process dies, or is killed, all the resources associated to
it are released. Memory is put back into the pool, file handles are
closed etc. Also, a process contains one or more threads. Killing a
process kills all the threads in the process. 

Without having processes, from a pratical standpoint, you cannot have
programs which run to completion and exit. Thus you cannot have a
shell.
 
> I do not see anything wrong with an application (call it shell) that
> is capable of both accessing a file system as well as loading from
> that file system a file and running it.

To me, that is more like a boot loader and less like a shell, although
what you describe is somewhere between the two. To be a shell, what
has been loaded must be able to exist and be unloaded, and you must be
able to load something else which can exist and be unloaded,
add-infinitum. For this you need processes, not threads.

               Andrew

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