Re: Alternate solutions (Was: Re: NFS still has caching problem)

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Sat, 27 Jul 1996 20:54:32 +0100 (BST)

> Linux could (carefully) add a few procedure calls to do what you need to
> the end of the v2 list and all would be well. You could check, out of
> band at mount time, if the other side supported your new stuff, and use it
> only when it works - I've done this for SunOS for POSIX and in IRIX for
> BDS support.

I seriously question the wisdom of SunRPC. We want a situation where we can
predict boundaries so that we can reliably read blocks or share them into
the disk caches. Thus knowing the format is always read 128 bytes of header,
process, think, read data block direct to disk cache. Rather than piecemeal
scanning of headers to get to the data.

Sure it makes the protocol suck rocks over slow links, but on a slow link we
can afford the compute time to compress/decompress it at another layer.

Alan