Subject: Re: New submission: RFS
To: NetBSD Kernel Technical Discussion List <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: Greywolf <greywolf@starwolf.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 10/20/1999 20:28:47
On Tue, 19 Oct 1999, Greg A. Woods wrote:

# However even AT&T's original RFS would still need some major overhaul in
# order to work well on a modern BSD, so I'm only lightly suggesting that
# the name "RFS" be reserved for it or something like it (i.e. a stateful
# remote file sharing protocol that preserved "Unix" filesystem semantics).
# 
# For example the SunOS-4.1.4 implementation demonstrated this in that
# some operations were not supported fully, and some data types were not
# fully transportable (such as an inode number, restricted to "ushort" in
# SysVr3). 

Keep in mind that RFS was never designed to be used in an OS-wise hetero-
geneous environment.  AT&T intended it to be run in an AT&T SVRx environment
and damn the torpedoes.

# Some of these issues were dealt with in SysVr4 though, IIRC. [I used RFC
# with SunOS-4.1.4 to an ISC-2.2 (SysVr3.2/i386) box once and was
# successful in accessing tty devices for remote modem sharing....]

I think this was fortuitous happenstance.  SVR4 was the first System V
to begin to catch up with the rest of the UNIX world (remember:  most
sites that used networking were, for a LONG time, based on Berkeley-style
systems -- including the Berkeley FFS.  SVR4 finally caught on to this
and used it.)  There were hybrid extensions (UniSoft UniPlus+) which
were SVR[23] with NFS and NIS glued on, but...

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: true inheritors of the UNIX(tm) legacy.