RFS vs. NFS

[Eduardo Krell]

In article <10219 at steinmetz.steinmetz.ge.com> dawn!stpeters at steinmetz.UUCP (Dick St.Peters) writes:

>Consider RTI's Freedomnet, which RTI advertises as supporting full
>UNIX file system semantics.  However, if program foo physically
>resides on a remote machine, typing foo causes foo to run on the
>remote machine.

If you consider executing a file as part of the UNIX file system semantics
(which I don't), then the above behavior is not transparent.

>That's not what one would normally expect, but it happens to be very
>convenient when foo is, say, a VAX binary executeable resident on a
>VAX and you happen to give the command on a Sun.  For most programs,
>this is about as transparent as you can get: from a computation (data
>in --> data out) point of view, you get the same result whether the
>file is local or not, thus meeting ekrell's criterion.

Again, you're considering execution semantics, which clearly don't
belong in the File System. On Locus (now part of IBM's AIX), you could
exec any binary on any node and it would be executed on an appropriate
cpu. eg, exec'ing a Vax binary from a Sun would make it run on a Vax
CPU if available, fail otherwise.
    
    Eduardo Krell                   AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ

    UUCP: {ihnp4,ucbvax}!ulysses!ekrell		ARPA: ekrell at ulysses.att.com