Re: [9fans] 9P vs. FUSE

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

> > is that all files are equal, and doing away with abominations like
> > symlinks, device nodes and ioctls.
> 
> the 9P semantics for those things would be `wrong' (for the suggested use) anyway.
> a remote 9P's device node would access the remote device, not the local one, which
> is useful, but not for remotely-mounting roots.

ioctl allows one to pass a pointer into the kernel, doesn't it?
it's kind of hard to pass a pointer via 9p. ;-)

i believe that research unix also suffered from this problem,
but hacked around it by including 64 bytes starting with
the ptr in question.

> the basic problem, which i expect will never be addressed by the linux people,
> is that mknod and major and minor device numbers were of their time and now
> past their prime.  (that's just one of the things that ``smells really bad''.)

one of the things about plan 9 that looks better and better as you use
it is the fact that devices are fileservers, not special inodes.  this allows
one device to present many files easily, reducing the need for the things
in unix that didn't work so well.

- erik