[TUHS] Portals in 4.4 BSD

[Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016, at 04:45 PM, Tony Finch wrote:
> 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

Thanks a lot, Tony. Looks like Portal is alive, at least in some of the
BSD variants. I will try these out.

-- 
  Ramakrishnan