From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([208.92.234.80] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1NhRqq-0007eZ-Im for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:08:48 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id BD573E068F; Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:08:03 +0000 (UTC) Received: from s15216962.onlinehome-server.info (forum.psychotherapie.org [217.160.22.205]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6AD1DE068F for ; Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:07:59 +0000 (UTC) Received: (from uucp@localhost) by s15216962.onlinehome-server.info (8.13.3/8.13.3) with UUCP id o1GI7wgQ032573 for gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org; Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:07:58 +0100 Received: from excalibur.local ([192.168.0.45]) by nibiru.metux.de (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id o1GI3dHx017002 for ; Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:03:39 +0100 Message-ID: <4B7ADE5C.9060403@metux.de> Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:05:16 +0100 From: Enrico Weigelt Organization: metux IT service User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20091124 SeaMonkey/1.1.18 Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] How the HAL are you supposed to use these files? References: <20100208222047.GA6553@muc.de> <201002151057.34557.joost@antarean.org> <4B799E95.2010700@metux.de> <201002160923.49451.joost@antarean.org> <4B7AAC72.9010107@kutulu.org> In-Reply-To: <4B7AAC72.9010107@kutulu.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Archives-Salt: 3829880d-925a-40b1-bcd5-44c243ec01b7 X-Archives-Hash: f9af9ab01c03a2133151da36c00bc627 Mike Edenfield wrote: > Just for reference, 9p is not Plan 9, it's only the Plan 9 network > protocol/distributed file system, which you can use on Linux with the > appropriate file system modules. Right. Either you use the kernel module (which now is in mainline for quite a long time), or 9pfuse, or one of the userland libraries around (eg. libmvfs). The basic idea behind this all is to use a filesystem as a primary IPC interface. Files dont necessarily mean things stored on-disk, but streams/communication-channels in an hierachical namespace. (eg. /proc or /sys). This way you have a very simple IPC mechanism using the very same semantics as filesystems do traditionally. That's just consequently using the "everything's a file"-metaphor. As everything's a file, all an OS or an distributed environment has to provide is dispatching filesystem operations from client to server, whereever they may actually reside. For example, you can simply mount any Plan9 device via 9P, from anywhere, as long as you get some 9P path there. (BTW: 9P doesnt have the concept of ioctl()s. If some object has more than just a single IO stream, it's modeled as an directory, eg. containing some "ctl" file accepting additional commands, etc). cu -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Enrico Weigelt, metux IT service -- http://www.metux.de/ cellphone: +49 174 7066481 email: info@metux.de skype: nekrad666 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Embedded-Linux / Portierung / Opensource-QM / Verteilte Systeme ----------------------------------------------------------------------