Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!att-ih!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: NFS vs RFS
Message-ID: <4192@chinet.UUCP>
Date: 27 Mar 88 07:51:55 GMT
References: <3845@chinet.UUCP> <930@nusdhub.UUCP>
Reply-To: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Distribution: na
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 24

In article <930@nusdhub.UUCP> rwhite@nusdhub.UUCP (Robert C. White Jr.) writes:
>> 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.
>	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.

But my point was about passing ioctl()s to remote devices.  The type
of struct passed to ioctl is *device dependent*.  How is a dissimilar
remote machine going to prepare a canonical form of something known
only to a different machine?  Or alternatively, how can the device
driver make sense out of something passed to it by a machine that doesn't
know what is needed?  In the common case of the termio struct, it
might make sense to convert, but I don't see how it can be generalized.
The only machines that I know of with different byte ordering and RFS
are the 3B2 and the 6386.  Does anyone know if they can format each
others tape drives (or even put them in streaming mode)?

I don't mean to imply that anything is wrong with RFS because of this,
it is just a difficult problem...
 -Les Mikesell