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Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:42:57 -0800
From: "Roman V. Shaposhnik" <rvs@sun.com>
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To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] success with 9vx from a terminal
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On Mon, 2008-11-10 at 16:42 -0700, andrey mirtchovski wrote:
> > ... would you really honestly say that rolling out your
> > own notes forwarder is a *neat* trick? As opposed to
> > be able to use basic system's FS functionality?
>
> ok, how would you implement it, then? how would you deliver a note to
> a process that's running on a remote machine?

I would like to be able to import the /proc (or similar) filesystem from
the remote machine and bind it over the files that my local kernel uses
to send notes to the proxy process. That's how my "ideal world" model
would work. Observe how that was also the first suggestion on the "notes
thief" thread. Do you think it is a coincidence?

> would you be introducing "distributed" notes in which you can specify a
> target machine as well as a target process?

Of course not! But I still would like *not* to be forced to invent
a covert channel for things that really seem to belong to a devproc.c.

Look, seriously, when cpu(1) is run inside a rio window the only reason
it has to jump through these hoops is because rio sends notes using a
notepg file located in a completely unrelated subdirectory in /proc.

I'm not saying I know of a better way as of right now, all I'm saying
is that notes and how the group of processes is handled by the Plan9
kernel feels much less elegant than the rest of the system.

> rmnoteproc() as implemented in cpu.c is just about the simplest way to
> do such a thing.

Given the constraints that I now understand notes require -- yes. But,
honestly, don't you feel weird that /dev/cons gets proxied by a simple
bind operation and notes are *the only* part of the system that need
special handling?

> it only requires one thing: the remote tree mounted in /mnt/term (which really
>  is the clever bit).

Well it is the kind of cleverness that 9fans tend to dislike in other
systems.

Thanks,
Roman.