Tux was a nice experiment, until somebody showed that you can get the same performance from userspace by using sendfile(). The performance argument no longer holds.
Agreed, but I believe there are still some gray areas. For example, using multiple streams for transfering a file. Yes, this can be done in the user mode, probably as effectively, but doing it in the kernel is still an interesting thing to do.
If you mean "interesting" as in "interesting ways to crash your kernel by minor programming errors", I agree.
-- Pradeep Padala http://ppadala.blogspot.com
-- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/