Design goals

[Bas Wijnen]

Hi,

Here's the list of design goals I promised, sorted by priority.  The goals
mentioned are the ones that came up in the discussion (at least the ones I
could still find in the archives), excluding "security".  I think most of that
one is present via other goals.

stability
robustness
resource accountability
confinement
support for most legacy applications
persistent sessions for users
--------- Anything above this line is essential --------------
confinement with endogenous verification
soft real time
setting diverse resource distribution policies
persistence
no ACLs
--------- Anything below this line is optional ---------------
small memory footprint
support for all POSIX applications
hard real time

So, this list is sorted in three sections.  Here's what they mean:

We should try very hard to build a system which at least has all the features
in the first two sections.  If at all possible, we must have those features.
The difference between them is that if we find that we cannot achieve a
feature from the first section, we should give up and do something else.  For
the second section, we should just feel miserable and continue without the
feature.

Features in the third section or optional.  They are nice to have (or at least
allow to be implemented later), but we can drop them for reasons like "that'll
cause too much delay to implement".

I want to emphasize that this list is how _I_ feel about it.  I think we
should decide on a list like this, so we all know what we'll build.
Therefore, please send your own personal version (or perhaps better: changes
to mine with an explanation if appropriate) to the mailing list.

Thanks,
Bas

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