I *do* serve several 100k ISP customers per box with about 15 UIDs
in the system. All those customers have *same* uid.
So, I don't see that "uid equate to user" is necessary unless you really
want to support NFS/CODA/AFS mounts to billions of people.
Of course, doing NFS support at campus-wide setup is an interesting thing
all by itself, but that is *not* a thing that any sane ISP would do!
> How many problems would be introduced by making them both 128 bits and
> using the UUID algorithm to generate uids and gids?
A lot! Going to 32-bits with current glibc-2.1 things is easy,
because the userspace is already 32-bits and "all" you need are new
syscalls with enlarged __kernel_uid_t and __kernel_gid_t, but going
into larger ones will cause pain in form of requiring a set of new
syscalls *AND* user-visible libc changes forcing to change also lots
of programs now using uids and gids. Things might not be as simple
as 'just recompile'...
Using 64-bits allows treating them as integers, but 128-bits are not
usually supported as integers by gcc/egcs..
Also, unless you want to make things to perform poorly at all of these
popular register-poor intel based systems (hopefully ia-64 is radically
different!), then you should NOT use even 64-bit values more than
absolutely necessary!
> --Tim Smith
/Matti Aarnio <matti.aarnio@sonera.fi>
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