On Sat, 11 Apr 1998, David A. Gatwood wrote:

> > NetBSD has the same type of setup. They're called vnodes. :-)
> 
> Always wondered what vnodes were referring to.

I think Sun coined the term, when they added nfs support. The vnode layer
represents an abstraction of all the things you'd want to do to an inode,
but removing any ties to the particular underlying fs.

So most of the kernel runs around happily with vnodes, and doesn't care if
the underlying "file" lives on a local ffs disk, an MS-DOS partition, an
HFS partition, an NFS server, or an AFS server.

Take care,

Bill