Re: [9fans] 9vx and local file systems

["Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>]

> A little while back Russ suggested that someone might
> want to look into making 9vx boot using a native
> fossil/venti file system partition for root.  For
> anyone who's interested, as of this morning, that
> is working.  It's a little kludgy in places, but
> mostly it's not too bad.  When I've cleaned it up
> a bit I'll make some patches available.

Thanks for working through this.
I'm glad to hear it works.

> - boot/boot did bad things if the localroot
> wasn't set, so when using boot/boot it's now .

What bad things did it do?  The code is supposed
to cope gracefully with localroot == nil.  I'd rather
fix the code that couldn't cope.

> - The messiest bit, though, is venti and networking.
> boot/boot figures it needs to set up the loopback
> interface for venti.  But /net/ipifc doesn't exit
> and boot/boot considers this fatal.  I suppose
> the Right Way(tm) to is to implement /net/ipifc
> and have it translate operations to the underlying
> network stack, but that seems an awful lot of
> work, for rather few applications.  The not so
> right way would be to fake it, providing the
> interface, but just pretend all the messages
> succeed.  But I copped out.  I made one change
> to boot/boot.  Now if it fails to open /net/ipifc/clone,
> it's not fatal.

I think this is a fine solution for this particular case.

I would like to have a /net/ipifc that showed info
about the host IP interfaces, and then /boot/boot
could check whether there is already a loopback
before adding one, but that's certainly not necessary.

Russ