Re: 9P2000.s vs 9P2020 vs. ? (Was Re: [9front] Slow cp, support for 9P2000.s)

[Roman Shaposhnik <roman@shaposhnik.org>]

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 1:27 AM Romano <unobe@cpan.org> wrote:
>
> Since there's no existing discussion I can see, and IRC isn't meant for searching for answers to questions, is there anyone willing to summarize the state of solving problems like streaming for 9P?
>
> If Aiju remembers correctly, there were two things where 9P2000.s was found wanting:
> 1) it breaks the syscall interface; and
> 2) it forces 9P to run over TCP.
>
> FWIW, I finally finished reading through all of John's thesis, rather than just skimming, and I think John did a nice review of the previous work done in this area and presenting why he chose the solution he did.  His solution used TCP, but from his write-up, I don't see a technical reason why another transport protocol[1] could not be used. That would leave only breaking the syscall interface.

Any chance to see a link to John's thesis?

> Does breaking the syscall interface mean that it's merely adding a syscall? Or does it mean something else?
>
> Right now hget(1) is an rc script that uses webfs(4).  So if I'm at a terminal far away and am using webfs provided by the server I'm connected to, hget would be slow for a large file because the file would be transferred over 9P. It's no better than Plan 9's implementation, but no worse either.
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Transport_layer_protocols