From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2017 12:49:23 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] RFS was: Re: UNIX of choice these days? In-Reply-To: <201709281428.v8SES819010466@freefriends.org> References: <201709270844.v8R8i2kd021180@freefriends.org> <201709281349.v8SDnHp2005910@freefriends.org> <20170928140700.GN28606@mcvoy.com> <201709281428.v8SES819010466@freefriends.org> Message-ID: <20170928194923.GW28606@mcvoy.com> On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 08:28:08AM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote: > > > > Kevin Bowling wrote: > > > > > > > I guess alternatively, what was interesting or neat, about RFS, if > > > > anything? And what was bad? > > > On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 07:49:17AM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote: > > > Good: Stateful implementation, remote devices worked. > > Larry McVoy wrote: > > > I'd argue that stateful is really hard to get right when machines panic > > or reboot. Maybe you can do it on the client but how does one save all > > that state on the server when the server crashes? > > > > NFS seems simple in hindsight but like a lot of things, getting to that > > simple wasn't chance, it was designed to be stateless because nobody > > had a way to save the state in any reasonable way. > > I won't disagree with you. > > I remember that stateful vs. stateless was one of the big technical > debates of the time, and I remember that (my impression of) the general > feeling was that stateful was better but much harder to do / get right. > (Again, I don't want to start another long thread over this, especially > as I don't really remember any more than what I just wrote.) > > So we can downgrade "stateful" from "good" to "different" and let > it go at that. :-) That other post that had a link to a post from Rick Macklem tickled my memory so I went looking. He wrote this: https://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/smm/06.nfs/paper.pdf which included some of what Clem has hinted at (I think). Did this stuff ever go anywhere? Is it BSD only? Abandoned or what? --lm