Named pipe support for support of RPC

Named pipe support for support of RPC

[Steve French]

The WINE team and others have requested that we add named pipe support
(at least as a client, since Samba server has some pipe support
already) - which is important to be able to get to management calls in
Samba and Windows, but also needed for certain apps.   This would be
fairly easy to do in cifs.ko (open/read/write/close are not much
different for pipes than files, although lookup would require "lookup
intents" to work and they would not show up in readdir), but I was not
sure if there was a precedent for how named pipes would show up (if at
all) in the namespace.   In Windows and a few other OS, the client
side passes the UNC name through the syscall (open) - e.g.
\\server\pipe\pipename and the VFS dispatches that to the registered
named pipe handlers - but in Linux it probably makes sense to do this
through a pseudo-filesystem which Wine can look for and open files
(pipes) in.   Is there a precedent for something similar or a pipe
pseudo file system?

-- 
Thanks,

Steve

Re: Named pipe support for support of RPC

[simo]

On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 14:44 -0500, Steve French wrote:
> The WINE team and others have requested that we add named pipe support
> (at least as a client, since Samba server has some pipe support
> already) - which is important to be able to get to management calls in
> Samba and Windows, but also needed for certain apps.   This would be
> fairly easy to do in cifs.ko (open/read/write/close are not much
> different for pipes than files, although lookup would require "lookup
> intents" to work and they would not show up in readdir), but I was not
> sure if there was a precedent for how named pipes would show up (if at
> all) in the namespace.   In Windows and a few other OS, the client
> side passes the UNC name through the syscall (open) - e.g.
> \\server\pipe\pipename and the VFS dispatches that to the registered
> named pipe handlers - but in Linux it probably makes sense to do this
> through a pseudo-filesystem which Wine can look for and open files
> (pipes) in.   Is there a precedent for something similar or a pipe
> pseudo file system?

If at all possible it would probably make sense to use the same naming
convention and not a pseudo filesystem. This would make it much easier
to port applications and I guess also allow user apps to share data
through pipes created in the normal name space with windows servers.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer <simo@samba.org>
Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat Inc. <ssorce@redhat.com>