Re: [9fans] QTCTL?

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

On 10/31/07, Charles Forsyth <forsyth@terzarima.net> wrote:
> > QTCL would ...
>
> perhaps one of my points is that in the Plan 9/Inferno world, you'd
> be better off marking the files you can cache, not trying to identify the ones
> that you can't.  one reason is the practical one of having to touch perhaps two or
> maybe three important servers instead of everything.
>

That makes a lot of sense -- particularly in a Plan 9 context.
It should be straightforward enough to modify appropriate "static"
content file servers to set this bit.

The current range of non-Plan9 servers (u9fs,spfs,etc.) present a bit
of difficulty in that there isn't a good way to transitively detect
this sort of thing when say a p9p server is mounted on Linux and then
re-exported, mapping it through the Linux VFS space.  But then I
suppose that's just a matter of not using the aforementioned tools to
export "special" files or file systems.  I've got some ideas to fix
this that I want to play with using Lucho's new
in-Linux-kernel-9p-server.  Of course, all of this is probably a
corner case that most people don't see anyways.

In the context of FastOS, dealing with thousands of nodes, we are
going to need to implement more sophisticated forms of caching.  Since
this is going to be pretty critical to even booting at larger scale,
its likely we'll be digging into this early next year.  We'll keep
folks in the loop as we get prototypes working.

             -eric