Re: [9fans] vmware fusion - plan9 snarf issue

["Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>]

> i've been reviewing open-vm-tools[1] and Russ' vmwarefs.  from what i
> can tell the old backdoor (low bandwidth) mechanism is still supported
> and the protocol hasn't changed.  there's an alternative high
> bandwidth mechanism but i'm not sure if the advent of the high
> bandwidth rpc was later than plan9's vmware tools (Russ?).

it happened about the same time.
there is support for the high bandwidth
channel -- read and write /mnt/vmware/msg.

> i setup a new vm (workstation v.  6.5.1) and installed from the latest
> iso image and compared it to my existing vm (4.5.3) running an older
> kernel.  the results from directly io to /mnt/vmware/snarf are the
> same as far as i can tell.  this pattern is consistent: the snarf
> buffer of the Plan 9 guest can be made visible in Windows host
> consistently ONLY if in Plan 9 guest, the snarf file is read before
> writing to it.  that is:
>
> cat /mnt/vmware/snarf
> echo 1 > /mnt/vmware/snarf

interesting.  maybe that's worth making a new binary.

russ