On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 10:56 AM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:

The Chaos network code made namei() break when it recognised the Chaos driver and left the remainder of the path for the driver to fetch & parse.

Yep - cute hack -- Domain (Aegis) did the same trick (same code author most likely). The biggest advantage is that open(2) can be used unchanged and 'parameters' are passed in ASCII to the lower code.

You mentioned that BBN Vax code did not use it. I've forgotten than how parameters like IP addresses were passed down? I had thought that Rob had is also in at least one version of the BBN code, as I remember talking to him about it at one point; but I have frankly forgotten. I'm pretty sure that wnj thought it was an ugly solution; which is why UCB did not try it.

We played with this solution also in the early Masscomp networking code (I had seen it in the Chaos driver from MIT); but by then the UCB code was coming out and user code was using sockets, so we just kept with that interface for code reuse reasons.

Clem