Re: A few questions.....

Alexander Viro (viro@math.psu.edu)
Thu, 24 Jun 1999 19:15:07 -0400 (EDT)


On Thu, 24 Jun 1999 androsyn@i95.com wrote:

> Well after doing a bit of thinking on the topic of a portal fs, and I
> recall somebody mentioning a sockfs. Would there be any interest in
> implementing the entire socket namespace symbolicly in a virtual
> filesytem?

Plan9 does it. With our VFS it is *wrong*. Really wrong. They have
user-available mount() and different processes may have independent
namespaces. So opening connection <=> mounting. That makes sense. Letting
the thing hang around the system-wide namespace doesn't.

> Or if you wanted it to do the higher level protocol handling like http or
> ftp.
>
> /sockets/outgoing/ip/tcp/http/10.0.0.1/80/someremotefile

Even more obvious candidate for per-process namespace.

> As for the binding something like
> /sockets/incoming/ip/tcp/inaddr-any/25
>
> Then if say the admin of the system only wanted user foo to be able to
> bind to a socket you could do something like
>
> chown foo /sockets/incoming/ip/tcp/inaddr-any/80
>
> Then if people really wanted to they could do away with the BSD socket()
> API(evil grin ;) Not that anybody ever would but.....

Erm... I'ld beg to differ. You are introducing the heck of overhead that
way. And BSD socket API is wider than files one. Ability to use sendto()
is *good*.

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