Re: [9fans] 9P2000 and p9p

[C H Forsyth <forsyth@vitanuova.com>]

>Could a EOD field in Rread be useful ? In some cases it would avoid
>a lot of messages. I think a very small servers (mController) and low
>channels.

yes, although we didn't find it a huge problem on the lego brick,
but then again the timing constraints were fairly lax, even for the lego clock.
we did run a zero-compressing run-length-encoding scheme to compress stat entries
(lots of 28 byte NAMELEN things) and thus directories, but that would have been
less necessary with the current 9p2000/styx encoding; if perhaps still useful.

perhaps more helpfully, note that when reading /dev/time, for instance or especially /dev/bintime,
the application (typically a library function, but not always),
only expects one record, and does just one read, causing just one Tread. cat still works though,
even though it does one extra read (that returns 0).  that's true for some other files too.