Re: [9front] Enabling a service

[Steve Simon <steve@quintile.net>]

re: why plan9 was started

i may be wrong but as i remember, a significant driver was the amount of work required to manage peoples sun workstations.

 it was felt that moving to a central file store and using caching locally in terminals (cfs(8)) would be a better approach and would mean there is a single filesystem to look after.

cfs works fairly well on low latency low bandwidth links (dialup) but much less well on modern high bandwidth higher latency links. its not that modern latency is so high, more that the modern experience leads us to expect a better experience than it can offer.

a better caching filesystem/protocol would  be a big win for remote plan9 access IMHO. i did wonder about something that used venti hashes to pass cache coherency data between remote systems, and then allowed them to resynchronise efficiently - but nothing came of it.

-Steve