On 3 Oct 1997, Assar Westerlund wrote:

: The good news: I have almost implemented this twice.
: 
: The bad news: the first one works under SunOS and is only partially
: ported to NetBSD.  If you are really interested and willing to hack on
: it, send me mail and I can send you the code.

I'd like to look at it.  I may tear it down to the bare bones and rebuild it
for NetBSD, but if I decide to use it, you'll certainly get copyright
credit.  :) 

:  The second one works under HP/UX and you can't have it (yet).  Sorry. 

<cough> Excuse me.  <grin>  I guess I'm just a BSD person at heart.

: They both work by communicating with a daemon over a character device
: and keeping a small cache of vnodes in the kernel that's serviced by
: the daemon.

The perspective I had was similar, but with removal of the character device
completely from the picture--using a unix domain socket instead.  This
difference severely reduces security concerns, since the socket is never
exposed to userland programs.

It wouldn't be using a "cache" of vnodes; it would use _real_ vnodes, with
the vnode "data pointer" as an opaque 'void *' that only the userland
program would understand.

=====
== Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Business tv@lucent.com)
== I know you like the Internet, Bobby.  Now go eat your Frosted Flakes.