Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 23 Jul 2007 11:37:41 -0500 | From | "Eric Van Hensbergen" <> | Subject | Re: Plan 9 Resource Sharing Support - what is it? |
| |
On 7/23/07, Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz> wrote: > Hi! > > What is "plan 9 resource sharing"? Some kind of mosix-like process > migration? Could you explain it in two lines in Kconfig? > > http://v9fs.sf.net > > is redirect to > > http://v9fs.sourceforge.net/ > > which tells me > > Moved to SWiK > > after clicking on that, I get to page with content, but no > explanation (could Kconfig/MAINTAINERS be updated?). >
Sure, I'll try to put something in that is considerably less vague and I'll update the URLs as well. We've been somewhat lagging on documentation. The most complete explanation is available in the Freenix paper: http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix05/tech/freenix/hensbergen.html
The short answer is that it is a Linux client for sharing file systems, devices, and system services mapped as synthetic file systems via a simple protocol. Its primary focus has been to keep things simple, and to try and maintain support for being able to effectively share synthetic file systems (like /proc, or /sysfs, or ones exported by Plan 9 applications (Russ Cox's Plan 9 ports package contains a set of Plan 9 applications ported to UNIX such as the Venti content addressable storage system)).
Its being used internally by (at the very least) IBM Research and Los Alamos National Labs. To date we've been focused on the client and a few specialized servers, we are currently broadening our approach to a better general-purpose server and evaluating if it makes sense to make an in-kernel server available. We've also been looking at using 9p in the context of virtualized environments to provide file service, and perhaps sharing of other system resources as well. Once we have a better handle on the server story, we'll produce a much larger body of documentation discussing usage as well as development of 9p file servers.
There are also side-efforts underway evaluating different methods of extended the 9p protocol to better support the Linux (and other UNIX) environments -- ideally without adding a signifigant amount of complexity.
-eric - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |