[TUHS] RFS was: Re: UNIX of choice these days?

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Fri Sep 29 05:49:23 AEST 2017


On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 08:28:08AM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> > > Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com> 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 <lm at mcvoy.com> 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




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