Windows-like registry for Linux?

[Michael ODonnell]

A cow-orker is tasked with implementing a lean-
and-mean registry thingy that's maybe similar
to the Windows registry, or maybe not.  The real
goal is for multiple processes/threads to be able
to perform attribute lookups cheaply and reliably
and possibly VERY frequently (many thousands/sec)
with updates possible but very infrequent.

Anybody know of such a beast?    Maybe a library
that uses shared memory?

Thanks,

  --M