On Wed, 30 Jun 1999 00:30:05 -0700 
 Lennart Augustsson <lennart@augustsson.net> wrote:

 > > Log Message:
 > > Add fhopen, fhstat, fhstatfs.
 > 
 > I thought I read just about all NetBSD mailing list, but here, out of the blue,
 > appears three new system calls.  I can't remember seeing any discussion
 > about them, anywhere.  But maybe my memory is failing.

I'm pretty sure this was discussed on tech-kern, albeit some time ago.

 > I presume they are "necessary", because don't we all dislike bloat?
 > Could someone explain to me what they do, and why we need them.

These are a generalization of the "iopen()"-like calls that e.g.
AFS used, and that some news servers use as a speed hack.

In the particular application for which Bill implemented it, the
application must be able to open a file, but the application has
no way to know a pathname for the file.

Regarding bloat, the implementation is remarkably small; the infrastructure
of these calls was already there.

        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>