Re: [9fans] long long whining

["Thomas Bushnell, BSG" <tb+usenet@becket.net>]

forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk writes:

> that's not what i meant.  given the existence of the vnode switch,
> and the primitives contained therein, there is no big obstacle to
> writing a vfs/vnode implementation that converts the operations
> within its scope into messages on a file descriptor in much the same
> way as network file systems were implemented by 8th edition, or by
> me in my re-ported Unix kernels for the VAX and Sun-3, using a
> simpler file system switch.  do just one of those and you can have
> as many things as you like outside the kernel.

There's already in BSD a "portal" concept, though it had not been
implemented when I wrote the essay in question.

Once you've done that, however, you are no longer a monolithic kernel,
however.  That's kinda the point of the essay.