Subject: Re: New submission: RFS
To: NetBSD Kernel Technical Discussion List <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: Greg A. Woods <woods@most.weird.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 10/21/1999 02:33:10
[ On Wednesday, October 20, 1999 at 21:03:21 (-0700), Matthew Jacob wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: New submission: RFS
>
> While it didn't have the XDR/RPC base of NFS which gives NFS more OS
> heterogeneity, it did manage to do remote device access stuff for those of
> us who felt that RMT protocols and their variants really aren't the right
> choice.

Actually the AT&T RFS protocol does use XDR from Sun to provide
byte-order independence on the wire (and makes specific reference to Sun
XDR in the protocol specification).  RFS is a remote procedure call
style protocol, but not in the Sun RPC sense though (thankfully! ;-).

As for full OS heterogeneity, well that's obviously not possible if
you're trying to maintain full Unix filesystem semantics (eg. chroot,
devices, etc.).

Yes, SunOS-4 RFS did work very well -- just as well as any RFS
implementation.  Indeed some friends of mine at HCR way back when were,
after lots of tuning, able to demonstrate RFS over a 56kbps TCP/IP WAN! ;-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>