[TUHS] Portals in 4.4 BSD

[TUHS] Portals in 4.4 BSD

[Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan]

Hello everyone!

I had been lurking this list for long, this is my first post to this
list.

I read with a lot of interest, an old Usenix paper by the late Richard
Stevens on a system called "Portals":

 <https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/neworl/stevens.html>

It explores a lot of ideas that found itself in Plan 9, like a
filesystem interface for sockets etc. Wondering if this survived in any
existing, so called "modern" Unix. I have always felt the need to have
something like this in Unix.

Cheers
-- 
  Ramakrishnan

[TUHS] Portals in 4.4 BSD

[Tony Finch]

Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan <ram at rkrishnan.org> wrote:
>
> I read with a lot of interest, an old Usenix paper by the late Richard
> Stevens on a system called "Portals": [...]
> Wondering if this survived in any existing, so called "modern" Unix.

A descendent of the original code is still present in DragonFlyBSD:

http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/tree/HEAD:/sys/vfs/portal
http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/tree/HEAD:/sbin/mount_portal

The facility still exists in NetBSD but it has been reimplemented on top
of puffs, the Pass-to-Userspace Framework File System development
interface.

http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?mount_portal

It survived in FreeBSD for a long time, but eventually was removed in 2012
rather than being made multiprocessor-safe.

https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/efcca33ac515c354e18135425794400ea32406a8

It also got removed from OpenBSD in 2011.

http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sbin/mount_portal/Attic/mount_portal.8

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
Trafalgar: Northerly or northeasterly 4 or 5, increasing 6 or 7 later, perhaps
gale 8 in northeast. Moderate or rough, but slight or moderate in southeast.
Fair. Good.

[TUHS] Portals in 4.4 BSD

[Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016, at 04:45 PM, Tony Finch wrote:
> Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan <ram at rkrishnan.org> wrote:
> >
> > I read with a lot of interest, an old Usenix paper by the late Richard
> > Stevens on a system called "Portals": [...]
> > Wondering if this survived in any existing, so called "modern" Unix.
> 
> A descendent of the original code is still present in DragonFlyBSD:
> 
> http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/tree/HEAD:/sys/vfs/portal
> http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/tree/HEAD:/sbin/mount_portal
> 
> The facility still exists in NetBSD but it has been reimplemented on top
> of puffs, the Pass-to-Userspace Framework File System development
> interface.
> 
> http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?mount_portal
> 
> It survived in FreeBSD for a long time, but eventually was removed in
> 2012
> rather than being made multiprocessor-safe.
> 
> https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/efcca33ac515c354e18135425794400ea32406a8
> 
> It also got removed from OpenBSD in 2011.
> 
> http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sbin/mount_portal/Attic/mount_portal.8

Thanks a lot, Tony. Looks like Portal is alive, at least in some of the
BSD variants. I will try these out.

-- 
  Ramakrishnan