From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2017 17:39:54 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] RFS was: Re: UNIX of choice these days? In-Reply-To: References: <201709270844.v8R8i2kd021180@freefriends.org> Message-ID: <20170928003954.GJ28606@mcvoy.com> I'll weigh on this since my office mate at Sun was the Sun RFS guy (Howard Chartok, great guy, Mr swapfs, I still remember a long discussion we had outside of Antonio's nuthouse in Palo Alto about how to tie different swap files to process groups so we could do better at pagin/pageout, but I digress. I should write up that discussion though, it's still useful today). >From what I remember, RFS worked well in a homogeneous environment. It passed structs in binary across the wire. NFS was based on Sun's RPC stuff that marshalled and unmarshalled the data. So it worked with little ints and big ints and Intel byte order and everyone else's byte order. RFS not so much. The RPC stuff is actually pretty sweet, I built something I called RPC vectors on top of it, Ron will remember that, but I digress again. It's important to note, when talking about NFS, that there was Sun's NFS and everyone else's NFS. Sun ran their entire company on NFS. /usr/dist was where all the software that was not part of SunOS lived, it was an NFS mounted volume (that was replicated to each subnet). It was heavily used as were a lot of other things. The automounter at Sun just worked, wanted to see your buddies stuff? You just cd-ed to it and it worked. Much like mmap, NFS did not export well to other companies. When I went to SGI I actually had a principle engineer (like Suns distinguished engineer) tell me "nobody trusts NFS, use rcp if you care about your data". What. The. Fuck. At Sun, NFS just worked. All the time. The idea that it would not work was unthinkable and if it ever did not work it got fixed right away. Other companies, it was a checkbox thing, it sorta worked. That was an eye opener for me. mmap was the same way, Sun got it right and other companies sort of did. On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 04:13:07PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote: > I guess alternatively, what was interesting or neat, about RFS, if > anything? And what was bad? > > On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 4:11 PM, Clem Cole wrote: > > > > > > On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 7:01 PM, Kevin Bowling > > wrote: > >> > >> > >> What were the market forces or limitations that led to NFS prevailing? > > > > Sun pretty much gave it away. It was simple and 'good enough.' > > > > The Issue was it not a real UNIX file system and did not support full UNIX > > semantics. For a lot of things (like program development) that was usually > > ok. It also exposed a lot a issues in user code - things like programs that > > never bothered to check for errors returns (like fclose). > > > > So bad things happened for a long time in a lot of code (silent holes in > > your SCCS files that did get detected until months later). > > > > But to Sun and NFS's credit, it solved a problem that was there and was > > cheap and so folks used it. > > > > Clem -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm