From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v619) In-Reply-To: References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Message-Id: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: jim Subject: Re: [9fans] Acme mailreader Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 16:09:39 +0000 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 177c5d38-eace-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On 15 Dec 2004, at 16:07, rog@vitanuova.com wrote: >> OS X seems to be fairly p9 friendly [...] >> lots of remote services (ftp, mail etc) are mounted as filesystems > > does this mean they're using user-level filesystems, > or that they've built ftp, mail, etc into the kernel? > I'm afraid I haven't got into the details of how it all works... Each user has a ~/Library, which contains various filesystems, such as ~/Library/Mail/POP-jim.whitson@gmail.com/, which contain the mboxes for email accounts. Whenever one accesses an ftp server, it ends up mounted (using /sbin/mount_ftp) there too. I assume there's some generality to this, but not enough - no-one's added sftp etc. support, which I assume someone would have done if it was properly extensible... I suppose that's evidence that it's all done in kernel-land. ugly :-(. Although, on the other hand, OS X is a micro-kernel, so it's userland in that sense...