Re: v9fs release

On 27 Nov 2002, Keith Nash wrote:

> I happened to be looking at the v9fs site:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/v9fs/ and I noticed that Ron Minnich and
> Greg Watson have just uploaded a 1.0 release.
> 
> v9fs aims to implement 9P on UNIX-like systems.  Currently only Linux
> with the 2.4.19 kernel is supported.

Actually earlier kernels are supported but the improvements on 2.4.19 are
so significant that you want to switch to 2.4.19. 

Also we've dumped all the old 2.0 and 2.2 support. 

hmm, I have been avoiding talking about v9fs since it is l*nux and I don't 
want anybody on this list to hit me :-) Oh well here goes.

I would actually way we've got 9p -- 3e anyway. Then those 9p guys went
and improved 9p so we can't say we're current. Progress is tough. We like 
9p2000 so much we plan to make the shift in a bit.

OK, a few new notes. 

First, we exploit the private mount stuff in linux to get private name
spaces that are inherited, private, etc.. That program is included in the
distribution (it's called rf). We can also mount through pretty much
arbitrary file descriptors, including pipes. The older stuff assumed
sockets, the newer stuff doesn't, inspired by some ideas Eric Grosse
passed on when he was out here.

Which means that if I am at a conference, on 802.11, am bored to tears by
the talk, and want my home directory, I do something like this:

 ~/src/v9fs//utils//v9fs_mountpipe /remotehome/rminnich /home/rminnich \ 
'ssh portal.lanl.gov ssh rminnich@xed src/v9fs/servers/ufs/p9server -s'

which means: 
mount onto local directory /remotehome/rminnich, from /home/rminnich on 
the remote machine, using the command 'ssh blah blah'. The ssh goes to our 
gateway box, then we ssh into the real thing, start the server with the -s 
switch which means 'assume stdin/out are pipes'. So server talks over that 
nice ssh socket. No tunneling, I don't like the idea of leaving these open 
sockets around: the data is direct via ssh, and of course encrypted etc.

The short story is that I can get secure (as ssh anyway), private name 
spaces on my laptop. This works pretty well, although some things are 
still not as fast as I'd like (file I/O is fast, directory listing for 
some reason is slow). 

GridFTP is dead. 

The other thing we have is mobile name spaces on our bproc clusters. All 
that means is you do something like this:
# get a clean empty private name space
rf
# now build in a mount
v9fs_mount /localdir /remotedir servername port
# now run somewhere
bpsh 0-9 /bin/somecommand

On each of those 10 nodes /localdir will be a private name space mount you
can get to. Even works as your cwd, so we can get homedirs for people who
care without resorting to NFS (A Very Good Thing; NFS sucks). It's not
'cpu', but we're getting there.

So, if interested, take a look. Andrey can tell you about all the bugs :-)

9p2000 is in the works as are some other things Russ Cox told us to do :-)

ron