13 Aug
2025
13 Aug
'25
3:34 p.m.
System V RFS was a different animal that Research RFS. IIRC
Stephen Rago or someone like that did a USENIX paper about putting
the Research RFS into SVR4.
SVR4 RFS required kernel changes for client and server, IIRC,
whereas I believe that Research RFS only needed kernel changes
for the client and used a user-level server.
To borrow a phrase, "memory grows dim", so take the above with a
grain of salt.
Arnold
Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
"never made it outside Bell Labs" was a poor
choice of words for
"never gained acceptance outside of Bell Labs".
I agree with Dan and Arnold, but I lament the fact that NFS : RFS ::
intranet : internet RFS had the grander vision. To be fair, I must
admit that I have no idea how efficient or robust the released version
was. Certainly the original worked very well.
Doug
On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 11:00 AM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
>
> Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:00 AM Douglas McIlroy
> > <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > > I was always sorry that Peter Weinberger's RFS never made it outside
> > > Bell Labs. It allowed networking between separately administered
> > > systems by mapping UIDs.
> >
> > I believe it did? If I recall correctly, it was available with System
> > V, though perhaps I am misremembering.
>
> It was a different RFS, developed by USG. It had full Unix semantics,
> including ioctls and fcntl, for machines of the same architecture. It
> was stateful, which meant if the server went away, you could hang your
> shell at the very least. It first came out in SVR3.
>
> Earlier versions of SunOS 5 supported it; it was dropped in later
> versions.
>
> It didn't get widespread support both because NFS had a big head
> start, and because by the time it came out, the SVR3 licensing terms
> had gotten onerous for most vendors.
>
> No disagreement with the rest of you note. :-)
>
> Arnold