From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Ronald G. Minnich" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Cc: "Gregory R. Watson" Subject: Re: [9fans] v9fs release In-Reply-To: <20021127213402.29814.qmail@mail.dirac.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 15:28:46 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 297621de-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On 27 Nov 2002, Keith Nash wrote: > I happened to be looking at the v9fs site: > http://sourceforge.net/projects/v9fs/ and I noticed that Ron Minnich and > Greg Watson have just uploaded a 1.0 release. > > v9fs aims to implement 9P on UNIX-like systems. Currently only Linux > with the 2.4.19 kernel is supported. Actually earlier kernels are supported but the improvements on 2.4.19 are so significant that you want to switch to 2.4.19. Also we've dumped all the old 2.0 and 2.2 support. hmm, I have been avoiding talking about v9fs since it is l*nux and I don't want anybody on this list to hit me :-) Oh well here goes. I would actually way we've got 9p -- 3e anyway. Then those 9p guys went and improved 9p so we can't say we're current. Progress is tough. We like 9p2000 so much we plan to make the shift in a bit. OK, a few new notes. First, we exploit the private mount stuff in linux to get private name spaces that are inherited, private, etc.. That program is included in the distribution (it's called rf). We can also mount through pretty much arbitrary file descriptors, including pipes. The older stuff assumed sockets, the newer stuff doesn't, inspired by some ideas Eric Grosse passed on when he was out here. Which means that if I am at a conference, on 802.11, am bored to tears by the talk, and want my home directory, I do something like this: ~/src/v9fs//utils//v9fs_mountpipe /remotehome/rminnich /home/rminnich \ 'ssh portal.lanl.gov ssh rminnich@xed src/v9fs/servers/ufs/p9server -s' which means: mount onto local directory /remotehome/rminnich, from /home/rminnich on the remote machine, using the command 'ssh blah blah'. The ssh goes to our gateway box, then we ssh into the real thing, start the server with the -s switch which means 'assume stdin/out are pipes'. So server talks over that nice ssh socket. No tunneling, I don't like the idea of leaving these open sockets around: the data is direct via ssh, and of course encrypted etc. The short story is that I can get secure (as ssh anyway), private name spaces on my laptop. This works pretty well, although some things are still not as fast as I'd like (file I/O is fast, directory listing for some reason is slow). GridFTP is dead. The other thing we have is mobile name spaces on our bproc clusters. All that means is you do something like this: # get a clean empty private name space rf # now build in a mount v9fs_mount /localdir /remotedir servername port # now run somewhere bpsh 0-9 /bin/somecommand On each of those 10 nodes /localdir will be a private name space mount you can get to. Even works as your cwd, so we can get homedirs for people who care without resorting to NFS (A Very Good Thing; NFS sucks). It's not 'cpu', but we're getting there. So, if interested, take a look. Andrey can tell you about all the bugs :-) 9p2000 is in the works as are some other things Russ Cox told us to do :-) ron