Re: [9fans] RFS alternatives (Was: Living with Plan 9)

[Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 2:26 PM,  <rbnsw-plan9@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> --- On Wed, 8/6/11, I wrote in part:
>
>> I am old enough to remember RFS the Remote File Sharing
>> Protocol on SVR4 that offered access to remote devices, but
>> I don't have that and I'm not aware of whether there are any
>> distributed file  protocols freely available for *nix
>> that do that.
>
> Um, does v9fs remote Linux devices? I find it hard to imagine it would remote ioctls but it makes sense *nix to *nix.
>

Depends on how you configure it.  There is a nodevmap option to the
v9fs mount which will instruct it to just access the remote devices
directly instead of just mapping their major/minor numbers to local
devices.  You are correct in your imagining that we don't go anywhere
near ioctls with a 10 foot pole.  However, many things "just work"
without ioctls these days.

>
> That just leaves my issues with X.
>

Actually, its a bit worse than that.  The physical network devices
aren't file system accessible anymore, so you'd need to remote them as
a service (via Inferno or something) or use the tap device and remote
that and hope that it doesn't require ioctls (and I think it might).

        -eric