[TUHS] Re: NFS 40th anniversary event

[arnold@skeeve.com]

System V RFS was a different animal that Research RFS. IIRC
Stephen Rago or someone like that did a USENIX paper about putting
the Research RFS into SVR4.

SVR4 RFS required kernel changes for client and server, IIRC,
whereas I believe that Research RFS only needed kernel changes
for the client and used a user-level server.

To borrow a phrase, "memory grows dim", so take the above with a
grain of salt.

Arnold

Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> "never made it outside Bell Labs" was a poor choice of words for
> "never gained acceptance outside of Bell Labs".
> I agree with Dan and Arnold, but I lament the fact that NFS : RFS ::
> intranet : internet  RFS had the grander vision. To be fair, I must
> admit that I have no idea how efficient or robust the released version
> was. Certainly the original worked very well.
>
> Doug
>
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 11:00 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
> >
> > Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:00 AM Douglas McIlroy
> > > <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > > > I was always sorry that Peter Weinberger's RFS never made it outside
> > > > Bell Labs. It allowed networking between separately administered
> > > > systems by mapping UIDs.
> > >
> > > I believe it did?  If I recall correctly, it was available with System
> > > V, though perhaps I am misremembering.
> >
> > It was a different RFS, developed by USG.  It had full Unix semantics,
> > including ioctls and fcntl, for machines of the same architecture. It
> > was stateful, which meant if the server went away, you could hang your
> > shell at the very least. It first came out in SVR3.
> >
> > Earlier versions of SunOS 5 supported it; it was dropped in later
> > versions.
> >
> > It didn't get widespread support both because NFS had a big head
> > start, and because by the time it came out, the SVR3 licensing terms
> > had gotten onerous for most vendors.
> >
> > No disagreement with the rest of you note. :-)
> >
> > Arnold