Re: Regarding a Simple Version of nfs & nfsd

["Fawad Lateef" <fawadlateef@gmail.com>]

On 3/21/06, Avishay Traeger <atraeger@cs.sunysb.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 14:09 +0500, Fawad Lateef wrote:
> > I think stackable file system can be used as the server side daemon
> > with network communication support (somewhat like nfsd) which controls
> > the underlying file system (which can be any other normal fs)
>
> Well I suppose you could do that, but you would be throwing out almost
> all of the stackable file system code.  nfsd isn't really a file system
> - it gets NFS requests from the network, and translates them to file
> system requests.  No mounting, no inodes, etc.  It would be a waste of
> time to start with a stackable file system, when the only stacking you
> need to do is calling file system functions.
>

Ya, you are right. Stackable file system isn't needed but it can help
in understanding about  how stacking can be done :)

> > and as
> > far as client is concern it can act like a complete file system which
> > actually does nothing by it-self rather get data from the stackable fs
> > on the server (somewhat like nfs), so the client/user can use that
> > filesystem to mount the server filesystem. (I think Avishay this is
> > what Uzair wants to ask)
>
> If the lower-level file system doesn't do anything, then what's the
> point of stacking?  Of course, you can stack over NFS, but I think
> that's cheating :).  Sure you can stack over something like ext2, and
> send requests to the NFS server instead of ext2, but what's the point of
> having ext2 there?
>

What do you mean by lower-level file system ? The Client file system
must behave like a normal file system but it will perform fs requests
through the use of server daemon (which will act as a stack over fs
like ext2) and obviously I wasn't saying to use NFS or stack over it
rather create a complete different client file system according to
needs :)

--
Fawad Lateef