10 Jan
2017
10 Jan
'17
8:33 p.m.
Reputed origins of SVR4:
From SunOS:
...
NFS
And, sadly, NFS is still with us, having somehow upstaged Peter
Weinberger's RFS (R for remote) that appeared at the same time.
NFS allows one to add computers to a file system, but not to
combine the file systems of multiple computers, as RFS did
by mapping uids: NFS:RFS::LAN:WAN.
Doug
10 Jan
10 Jan
9:40 p.m.
Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
And, sadly, NFS is still with us, having somehow
upstaged Peter
Weinberger's RFS (R for remote) that appeared at the same time.
NFS allows one to add computers to a file system, but not to
combine the file systems of multiple computers, as RFS did
by mapping uids: NFS:RFS::LAN:WAN.
This changed long ago, NFSv4 no longer sends uid's but user names and supports
mappings.
NFS won because it was not built on top of UNIX semantics and thus allowed to
port it to other platforms.
The nice idea in RFS was that it supported remote devices, but the iotcl
handling was a problem in AT&T UNIX before SVr4 ??? added a flag to tell
whether the data source was in kernel or userland. I am not sure wether RFS
had a concept like XDR for ioctls.
The funny thing: RFS was supported in SunOS4, but not in SunOS-5.
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
joerg.schilling(a)fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/
9:43 p.m.
On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 10:40:03PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
The nice idea in RFS was that it supported remote
devices, but the iotcl
handling was a problem in AT&T UNIX before SVr4 ??? added a flag to tell
whether the data source was in kernel or userland. I am not sure wether RFS
had a concept like XDR for ioctls.
I believe it did not.
The funny thing: RFS was supported in SunOS4, but not
in SunOS-5.
And Howard Chartok was ecstatic over that decision (he was my office
mate and did the port into SunOS 4.x. Not one of his favorite projects.)
11 Jan
11 Jan
12:56 a.m.
Beware of confusion.
There is the 8th and 9th edition remote file protocol
(I have papers somewhere I think), by Weinberger.
This evolved into 9p, Plan9’s file protocol.
There is also RFS, I think a USG package for SYSVr3. The paper I have
About this is by Author L Sabsevitz, though I don’t know if he was the author
of the code, or just the paper.
They are rather different beasts with similar names.
-Steve
On 10 Jan 2017, at 21:43, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 10:40:03PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
The nice idea in RFS was that it supported remote
devices, but the iotcl
handling was a problem in AT&T UNIX before SVr4 ??? added a flag to tell
whether the data source was in kernel or userland. I am not sure wether RFS
had a concept like XDR for ioctls.
I believe it did not.
The funny thing: RFS was supported in SunOS4, but
not in SunOS-5.
And Howard Chartok was ecstatic over that decision (he was my office
mate and did the port into SunOS 4.x. Not one of his favorite projects.) 
3:17 a.m.
New subject: NFS aka the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines
As I recall, RFS was implemented over virtual circuits, whereas NFS was
over datagrams (UDP). RFS was well suited to Datakit, which only did
virtual circuits, and they often were used together inside Bell Labs.
One of the reasons NFS won is that IP won over Datakit.
On 01/10/2017 04:56 PM, Steve Simon wrote:
There is also RFS, I think a USG package for SYSVr3.
The paper I have
About this is by Author L Sabsevitz, though I don’t know if he was the author
of the code, or just the paper.
3:32 a.m.
New subject: NFS aka the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines
As a Sun guy it was obvious that NFS should win. Sun ran all of
engineering on NFS, it actually worked and worked well. When I left Sun
I found out that nobody did NFS anywhere as near as well as Sun did it.
At SGI NFS was a joke, we had senior engineers who said "don't trust
that, use rcp" (looking at you Dave Olsen). That was weird to me,
at Sun NFS just worked, as in you never thought about it not working.
Everywhere else it was so-so.
On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 07:17:20PM -0800, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
As I recall, RFS was implemented over virtual
circuits, whereas NFS was over
datagrams (UDP). RFS was well suited to Datakit, which only did virtual
circuits, and they often were used together inside Bell Labs. One of the
reasons NFS won is that IP won over Datakit.
On 01/10/2017 04:56 PM, Steve Simon wrote:
>There is also RFS, I think a USG package for SYSVr3. The paper I have
>About this is by Author L Sabsevitz, though I don???t know if he was the author
>of the code, or just the paper.
>
>
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
3:40 a.m.
New subject: NFS aka the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines
Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)mhorton.net> wrote:
As I recall, RFS was implemented over virtual
circuits, whereas NFS was
over datagrams (UDP). RFS was well suited to Datakit, which only did
virtual circuits, and they often were used together inside Bell Labs.
One of the reasons NFS won is that IP won over Datakit.
I think another reason is that AT&T got a lot more, er, "difficult"
about its licensing come SVR3, which introduced RFS. Many of the major
UNIX vendors (IBM, DEC, HP) didn't bother to license it. As most of them
already had NFS, it wasn't worth the trouble.
SunOS 4.0 had RFS. I think early versions of 4.1 did, but I'm pretty
sure that by 4.1.3 SunOS had removed it.
Arnold
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6 comments
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participants (6)
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arnold＠skeeve.com -
Doug McIlroy -
Larry McVoy -
Mary Ann Horton -
schily＠schily.net -
Steve Simon