[9fans] fidtab revisited

["Andrew Simmons" <andrew.simmons@monitorbm.co.nz>]

Pondering further on fidtab, I was wondering if anyone had any statistics on
the average and maximum number of fids in the table for any given connection
to u9fs. Since a hash table was considered appropriate, I would guess that
quite a few fids were anticipated, but since the current implementation is
effectively a linked list, I would also guess that there are not that many
in practice. My interest in this is that I'm tooling around with a knock-off
of u9fs running as an NT service serving NT files, mainly as an exercise to
nail down my understanding of how 9p works.

On a slightly related note, ever since reading "The Practice of
Programming", I had vaguely assumed that the pack and unpack routines in
chapter 9 were derived from 9p, but on reading the Plan 9 code it appears
that the marshalling and unmarshalling work is done by a number of
preprocessor macros. I'd be interested to know, if it's not confidential,
where pack and unpack are actually in use, and also why they aren't used in
Plan 9.

And finally. Dan Cross, get back to bed and take some paracetamol and get a
good night's sleep, or I'll ask Jim Choate to go to St. Petersburg with you
as an interpreter.