Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!umix!umich!mibte!gamma!ulysses!sfmag!sfsup!mjp
From: mjp@sfsup.UUCP (M.J.Purdome)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: NFS vs RFS
Message-ID: <2917@sfsup.UUCP>
Date: 18 Mar 88 06:14:46 GMT
References: <10370@ut-sally.UUCP> <720@uel.uel.co.uk> <45291@sun.uucp> <184@quick.COM>
Organization: AT&T-IS, Summit N.J. USA
Lines: 22
Summary: RFS control structures

In article <184@quick.COM>, srg@quick.UUCP writes:
> 
> Another problem with RFS is that the control structures are passed
> around in native binary (or so say the AT&T training folks), so you
> can't mount filesystems on machines with different byte orders.
> 

Actually, "RFS control structures" are all passed in a machine-independent 
format (XDR, I believe).  This includes all data structures that the
kernel knows about, like the stat structure, etc.  RFS _does_ run
across machines with different alignment and byte-ordering requirements.

Data written by an application is not converted, since there is no way 
for RFS to know the structure of the data to convert it to a canonical form.
I believe NFS works in a similar manner.  This may be what the
training folks meant.

-- 
    Mark Purdome  --  AT&T, 190 River Road A-130, Summit, NJ 07901
                      [ihnp4 | allegra]!attunix!mjp

    disclaimer:  my opinions != AT&T opinions