Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Path: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!brillig.umd.edu!steve From: steve@brillig.umd.edu (Steve D. Miller) Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: SUN and Subnets Message-ID: <8608111349.AA28696@brillig.umd.edu> Date: Mon, 11-Aug-86 09:49:57 EDT Article-I.D.: brillig.8608111349.AA28696 Posted: Mon Aug 11 09:49:57 1986 Date-Received: Mon, 11-Aug-86 18:55:44 EDT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 75 Approved: tcp-ip@sri-nic.arpa I've heard a lot of things from a lot of people, and have some things to say on my own. Let's see if I can't make a stab at answering some of the questions here... In the first article in this discussion, Milo Medin (medin@ames) says: When I asked my SUN rep. about subnetting, he said that SUN OS 4.0 might have it, and that would be released in the Jan./Feb. '87 timeframe, but would make no committments. Other people I know who have asked got no commitment from SUN at all. Further, my SUN rep. mentioned that subnetting requires some non-trivial changes in NFS. I can't understand why this would be the case. OK. From what I have heard, Sun is trying to move to a 4.3BSD networking base with the 4.0 release. I have talked to (a) some people at a Sun/LMI NFS conference held in Boston in April and (b) one of the people supposedly working on it, and unless I have grossly misunderstood something I believe that this is indeed the case. The timeframe for the release sounds right to me; the 3.0 release is slated for October. Again, no commitments...but I did it myself and didn't think it was too hard. I didn't even have a real understanding of the networking code at the time I did it and I'm sure that the Sun people do, so they should have even less of a problem. Sun said at the NFS workshop that they were trying to get rid of ND, and that NFS was going to undergo a protocol rollover with the 4.0 release. I'm sure that NFS will need a lot of work to allow things like swapping, but I *know* that NFS version 2 (the one running in 2.0 and 3.0) works with little or no changes on top of a subnet-based kernel. I *ran* it on top of one (see below). If there's a problem, I'd love to hear what it is so I can fix it...but I think the rep is wrong on this one. The only thing that comes to mind at all is that the kudp_fastsend() routine used to get kernel RPC/UDP packets onto the wire as fast as possible takes a number of liberties (like no checksums) with the UDP/IP output routines and might well need a rewrite for subnets. Commenting it out works just as well, though...and I confess that's what I did. In another article on the subject, Mike Karels (karels@monet.berkeley.edu) says: I have been tempted to figure out how to package and distribute subnet support for Suns, but haven't taken the time to do so. Perhaps I could convince someone else working with Suns at Berkeley to package things up if a few sites could test it. You've got yourself a volunteer. I don't know how useful I'd be, but I can try to make sure that the stuff works for gatewaying. There's a room here that could stand to be its own network; now if I can just convince my bosses... In yet another article, Chris Torek (chris@mimsy.umd.edu) says: Steve Miller dropped the 4.3 TCP into our 3.0 kernels. Aside from one locally-introduced bug, it has been working well for some time. (The local bug was fixed a few days ago.) Once the file servers are stable---we have been suffering with disk problems (another local hack, this time in hardware)---we might consider distributing the code; but we will likely have to require both 4.3 and 3.0 source licenses (alas!). Well, I haven't really done all that yet. I had all of the 4.3BSD (beta!) networking code, including XNS and a protocol-independent version of NFS, in a local kernel based on Sun 2.0. It ran subnets to the same extent as the 4.3BSD beta release, and NFS didn't hiccup at all. As I said though, I did comment out the one (relatively small) piece of code that did the fastsend stuff. I will probably start work on the 3.0-based version in the next week or two, and we will probably let it out (with licensing restrictions like I stated above) once it seems stable. I don't know if "distribute" is the right word... -Steve Spoken: Steve Miller ARPA: steve@mimsy.umd.edu Phone: +1-301-454-1516 CSNet: steve@umcp-cs UUCP: {seismo,allegra}!umcp-cs!steve USPS: Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742