Re: Hurdish TCP stack

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 02:07:26PM -0600, Joshua Stratton wrote:

> If anyone hasn't read up on how Plan9 runs their network stack,

Probably most of us haven't...

> they have a separate directory of each connection.  An example in the
> paper is shown as the following,
> 
> # cd /net/tcp/2   <--- this is like the second TCP connection
> # ls -l
> ctl
> data
> listen
> local
> remote
> status

Looks pretty reasonable :-)

> They use an interesting system to control their connections using
> ASCII strings.  For example changing the packet size would be as
> simple as "2400 > ctl" would change the packet size to 2400 (some
> syntax to that effect).

Indeed, that's a very powerful property IMHO -- I wish the Hurd in
general was more like Plan9 in this regard.

> They say this approach makes it compatible with remote applications
> that can manipulate servers through a common interface.

Plan9 focuses their marketing totally on network transparency these
days. But it's not the only situation where it is beneficial -- the
ability to use common tools for all kinds of interfaces is very useful
in general.

> Supposedly all network connections use this interface (TCP, UDP, LP).

What is LP?...

> However, I'm not sure if I like the directory structure they use.  I
> would think the network interface should be shown like
> 
> /net/eth0/tcp/2
> 
> It might be worthwhile--but possible bad style?--to duplicate both
> hierachies so on may browse the connections by device or generally.

This sounds perfectly reasonable. Don't see any bad style in there :-)

-antrik-

PS. http://learn.to/quote :-)