Date: Wed, 04 Mar 1998 16:28:44 -0800 (PST) From: Simon Shapiro <shimon@simon-shapiro.org> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu> Cc: Jamie Bowden <jamie@itribe.net>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: SCSI Bus redundancy... Message-ID: <XFMail.980304162844.shimon@simon-shapiro.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980304175633.438a-100000@localhost>
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On 04-Mar-98 Chuck Robey wrote: ... > Would you mind expanding on that? I'm interested ... [ This list is turning into simon's own soap box. My apologies, but some of these issues are interesting to me and others. I hope for opposing views ] The original concept of Unix, the way I understand it was a symetrical I/O. All system resources are represented as files in a heirarchial filesystem. Files are uniformly presented as bytestreams. Then reality started messing it all up. Some files are seekable. some are not. no clean way to know that by looking at the file. Even dirtier, to tell a device something, you do not write to it. To hear something from a device you do not read it. You execute an orthogonal system call ioctl(2). Plan9 (and some devices in FreeBSD) have implemented read/write interface to /dev/foo.ctl. It should be consistent. It is not. Files are arranged in Heiracrchial order, and the mount concept was introduced to allow moving segments of the heiracrchy around. Alas, the mount is opaque. FreeBSD has a special means of taking this opacity out but it panics my system every time I try it. Unix-Unix communications is artificial, cumbersone and basically broken (See NFS). Plan9 introcuces a uniform, simple and clean message protocol that is uniform, universal, and clean. There are a host of other, even more important issues. They are well covered elsewhere. I just enjoyed the clean, elegant design. The implementation... Simon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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