Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ucsd!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!jack!nusdhub!rwhite
From: rwhite@nusdhub.UUCP (Robert C. White Jr.)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: NFS vs RFS
Message-ID: <930@nusdhub.UUCP>
Date: 26 Mar 88 02:36:38 GMT
References: <3845@chinet.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: National University, San Diego
Lines: 41

in article <3845@chinet.UUCP>, les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell) says:
> Likewise for the structs passed to ioctl() for various devices.  Thus the
> advantage of RFS being able to access remotely-mounted devices applies
> only to similar machines.
	From part 6 of Apendix 3 [page 128] of my "magic Book",
which is a loose bound set of pages which we received under
the title "porting rules" but which is in fact nothing of the
kind, I quote the following:

	"The dada structures for some system calls, like stat, fstat,
statfs, fstatfs, utime, fcntl, getdents, etc., which have shorts and
character strings, will involve out of place conversion."

	They also explain about XDR usage on the same page, and the
fact that the passage of XDR [canonical form] or primitive binary is
made at virtual circut setup time.
	The structures passed durring the above functions are difined
under the approprate command/token.  I don't see where it would be all
that though to swizle the bytes around if necessary.  Anybody who
needs the bytes swizeled will take that into account when they write
their driver just like for any other system/standard.

> Has anyone mentioned that currently RFS only
> supports mounting of complete directories (no symbolic links to files)?
> This sort of precludes sharing anything from /etc ....

	OF COURSE RFS doesn't support symbolic links....  RFS [under
SVR3+] is implemented as a "file system switch" module.  The "file
system switch" is the same mechanisim used to mount different types of
file systems under the same kernel.  As the SVR3 kernel does not
support symbolic links at all, I am not supprised that the RFS
standard is similarly inclined.


	As an added bonus, you may be interested to note that with the
merger-of-effort between AT&T and SUN Microsystems, in order to
produce an inclusive UNIX System Product, will be releasing an RFS/NFS
merged product which will determine the request type, and act against
it in accordance with the approprate standard.  Both SUN and AT&T
future releases and cross-grades are done with this in mind.

Rob.