What value could Lua bring to a Unix kernel? You could do some fast and very sophisticated manipulation of network traffic streams without requiring that each

What value could Lua bring to a Unix kernel? You could do some fast and very sophisticated manipulation of network traffic streams without requiring that each packet be copied to and from user-space. You wouldn't even have to develop much packet-twiddling code. There is a surprisingly large amount of network-specific open source Lua. Wireshark, the most popular network protocol analyzer, has dissectors written in Lua. [0] Nmap, the network mapper and port scanner, has a Lua-based scripting engine to allow session and endpoint property discovery in great detail. [1] The popular intrusion detection tool Snort Security Platform (SnortSP) has included a Lua interpreter since version 3.0. [2] Yes, keeping the interpreter in user-space is safer. I have a hard time imagining sandboxing within the language runtime being able to deal with some of the nastier traffic. Perhaps one prudent thing to do with an in-kernel interpreter would be to use a project-specific sanitizer that could reliably escape tokens and keywords found in live traffic. [0] "Lua Support in Wireshark" http://www.wireshark.org/docs/wsug_html_chunked/wsluarm.html http://www.wireshark.org/docs/wsug_html_chunked/wsluarm.html [1] "Nmap Scripting Engine" http://nmap.org/book/nse.html http://nmap.org/book/nse.html [2] “A Pig(Snort), A Moon (Lua) and one very happy developer (Bill)” http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/128135 http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/128135