semi/signal

I haven’t put a whole lot of thought into this, so there may be something major I’m overlooking. In any case, I was thinking that virtualizing socket ports per user in a multiuser operating system would be a very cool and worthwhile feature. Doing this would allow applications running under different users to bind to the same port. So, two users running an app with a server component could both accept incoming connections and function simultaneously and independently.

Now, the obvious question here is how would this map to an IP address seen on the local network. A lesson from virtualizing operating systems could be taken here: treat every user as a different machine on the network, so every user instance gets it’s own IP (set manually, assigned by DHCP via. a router, or whatever) and you could (I think) fake the MAC address easily.

There’s the obvious performance loss, but w/ current processors that should be fairly minimal, even for heavy traffic.

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