From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 1995 20:18:10 -0400
From: serge@euler.Berkeley.EDU serge@euler.Berkeley.EDU
Subject: remote device access
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0e3070f8-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19950428001810.XBLbrQ7UuoAaj0ilt_BdiCYQh0R-Hn4MIpqveVUERrs@z>

(``Oh, no, not this surge guy again.''  :-)

>>You could even conceivably bind /cpu/dri/xxx to /dev/xxx to access
>>cpu server's drivers? 

>you can already do that (several ways).

Yes, I know that.  I should have been more clear: I meant, e.g. if your
kernel doesn't have the driver you need (e.g. you just hooked up a
CD-ROM to your machine), you can import it from another machine and use
it on your machine.  This would differ from importing the binding of the
driver, e.g. /dev/cdrom, from another machine, since then you would be
using _its_ driver with _its_ CD-ROM, rather than with _your_ CD-ROM.

This would be similar to, e.g. QNX, where device drivers are processes.
E.g. you would network mount another machine's disk, run the driver/process 
from this network drive and use it to access your local device.

The idea is to make things even more uniform and remove further special
cases.  (I.e. the ``#name'' notation is Plan9's analog to major/minor
device numbers / mknod of Unix, which is ``magic''.)

``It has been our observation that when objects behave like files,
practically any program can use them without modification.'' (sic?)
--Ritchie, V8 Streams paper in '85 USENIX