Re: [fuse-devel] Fuse + socket = fuse/nfs?

[Martin C. A. <ma...@pa...>]

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:14:42 -0400 Edwin Olson <eo...@mi...> wrote:
> Has anyone done the obvious thing and slapped a TCP socket between the 
> libfuse interface and a fuse "pass-through" file system, so that you can 
> mount a remote file system? i.e., send all the fuse fn calls over the 
> socket. This could be a compelling alternative to NFS, but providing an 
> opportunity to make a couple simple improvements (secure authentication 
> and transport encryption come to mind!)

This is pretty much what the v9fs driver that was recently added to
the -mm tree does, except that the protocol is already endianness,
architecture, and (largely) operating system independent (it already
talks to three different operating systems: Linux, Plan 9 and
Inferno).

The advantages over NFS are much as you state. I would add that it also
makes remote synthetic file systems easy (and this would also be true of fuse).

The obvious question is: why do we need two such protocols, when one
would do? Well OSS is all about choice! (and, of course, there 
are always going to be some areas where each protocol will do better)

Martin
PS
 Linux Weekly News had a nice introduction to v9fs a couple of weeks ago,
it is towards the end of:
	http://lwn.net/Articles/136579/
for anyone interested...
-- 
Martin C. Atkins			ma...@pa...
Parvat Infotech Private Limited		http://www.parvat.com{/,/martin}