[TUHS] Portals in 4.4 BSD

Tony Finch dot at dotat.at
Fri Apr 29 21:15:02 AEST 2016


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.



More information about the TUHS mailing list