nfs, nfsd (was: Unionmount: proxying the control port)

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hello!

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 12:18:58AM +0300, Sergiu Ivanov wrote:
> For the sake of pushing the horizon of my knowledge, I'd like to ask
> one more question: is nfs a kind of an interface to nfsd, the latter
> being responsible for actually fetching the remote filesystems,
> maintaining caches, etc., while nfs's role being to publish this as a
> virtual filesystem?  (I'm asking because I was surprised when I found
> out that there not only is nfs, but also nfsd.)

It's actually simpler: nfs is the NFS client (that is, used for importing
/ ``mounting'' remote NFS file systems locally) and nfsd is the Hurd's
NFS server, which exports to other machines the local file system using
the NFS protocol.


Indeed both fsys_getfile and file_getfh are only used for
exporting-via-NFS purposes -- you can safely ignore that for now.  (I
don't know any details about that, but if I understand this correctly,
the worst thing which not implementing them means is that a remote user
(who is importing a Hurd machine's file system using NFS) won't be able
to see any files served / translated by unionfs (and most of the other
translators).)  That aside, I have never used nfsd and don't know of
anyone who has (during the last years).  I do use nfs (as does Olaf, as
he told), and it basically works.


Regards,
 Thomas

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