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From: dyer@spdcc.COM (Steve Dyer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.novell
Subject: Re: NFS Support in NetWare
Message-ID: <6614@spdcc.SPDCC.COM>
Date: 26 Feb 91 07:29:58 GMT
References: <1991Feb21.234900.11916@novell.com>
Organization: S.P. Dyer Computer Consulting, Cambridge MA
Lines: 35

In article <1991Feb21.234900.11916@novell.com> keith@ca.excelan.com (Keith Brown) writes:
>NetWare doesn't carry with it all the additional baggage that
>makes UNIX such a great interactive OS. NetWare does no swapping and
>paging to disk, it does not have to set up and tear down virtual
>machine environments for service processes, no unnecessary internal
>buffer copies are required to copy data between user and kernel space
>(Everything is kernel space in in NetWare OSs, consequently NetWare NFS
>transmits data directly from the disk cache to the network on client
>reads and shifts data directly from LSL (network) buffers to the disk
>cache on writes)

While I am willing to suspend my disbelief (until I try it) that a
Netware NFS server might be superior to a UNIX NFS server, a lot of what
you say is a red herring.

Now, attempting to compare oranges to tangelos, if you've got a UNIX machine
dedicated as NFS server (the analog of a Novell file server--remember, one
of these is not going to run 123 at the same time), mostly running nfsd
processes, there's no swapping or paging involved, except to handle whatever
extraneous non-NFS activity there might be (and this presumably would be
controlled by the sysmgr.)  Nfsd processes have their own context but run
in the kernel's address space.  In other words, "everything is in kernel
space" on a UNIX NFS server, too.  That is, one which is based on the Sun
reference kernel implementation (read: almost every single one.)

I mean, many of your arguments for the superiority of Novell over UNIX strike
me as more marketspeak than tech speak.  We might as well claim that a UNIX
NFS server is superior to a Novell server because it doesn't have the
"additional baggage" of dealing with DOS and Mac files.  Which might sound
good but the statement is pretty content-free.

-- 
Steve Dyer
dyer@ursa-major.spdcc.com aka {ima,harvard,rayssd,linus,m2c}!spdcc!dyer
dyer@arktouros.mit.edu, dyer@hstbme.mit.edu


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