From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:17:14 -0400 From: "Russ Cox" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] QTCTL? In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: Topicbox-Message-UUID: e2005ee8-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Plan 9's default is not to cache, making a "don't cache this" bit unnecessary. If the user explicitly requests caching (by using cfs, say), then he's responsible for making sure it is appropriate. If I tell the computer to cache /net, that's not the computer's problem, any more than if I bind /proc /net. Since there's no coherence protocol anyway, caching can't be done automatically. It might give the right answer most of the time, but it will screw up corner cases and make the system more fragile. This whole synthetic vs not mentality is Unix brain-damange. On Plan 9 there is no distinction. Everything is synthetic (or everything is not, depending on your point of view). Russ