adding plan9-like usernames to the kernel

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

Hi folks,


as part as a little research project for bringing Plan9 semantics
to Linux, I'd like to add textual usernames. In contrast to *nix,
Plan9 doesn't use numerical IDs, but names.

Obviously that needs some internal mapping between names and ids.

Should this go into struct user_namespace (where per-namespace
uid mapping lives) or to struct cred / struct user_struct ?

The primary consumer of this username will be the /dev/caphash
and /dev/capuse devices for switching the UID.
(an interesting question of course is, how to allocate the
numerical UIDs for given usernames)


--mtx

--
Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Free software and Linux embedded engineering
info@xxxxxxxxx -- +49-151-27565287