[COFF] Re: Terminology query - 'system process'?

[Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org>]

On Dec 15, 2023, at 6:21 AM, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I remember reading a paper on the design of NFS (it may have been the
> BSD paper) and there was a note about how the NFS server process ran
> mostly in the kernel; user code created it, but pretty much all it did
> was invoke a system call that implemented the server. That was kind of
> neat.

At Valid Logic Systems I prototyped a relatively simple network filesystem.
Here there was no user code. There was one “agent” kernel thread per remote
system accessing local filesystem + a few more. The agent thread acted on
behalf of a remote system and maintained a session as long as at least one
local file/dir was referenced from that system. There were complications as it
was not a stateless design. I had to add code to detect when the remote
server/client died or rebooted and return ENXIO / clear out old state.