smiller@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU (Steven M. Miller) (11/18/89)
Is there any reports/papers/etc out there on what was done to port NFS to Mach? It would seem that with Mach's VM scheme file sharing between multiple machines (particulary multiple mach machines) could prove to be a file consistency nightmare. Thanks in advance, -Steve -- -Steven M. Miller, U of MN
zs01+@andrew.cmu.edu (Zalman Stern) (11/21/89)
I'm not a Mach expert, but so far as I know, the NFS port to Mach was mostly putting vnode support in the kernel. I believe that the vnode hooks already support mmap so there shouldn't be too much magic involved. The only distributed virtual memory facilities I know of on Mach are implemented using external pagers and therefore would not involve the NFS code at all. The external pager is responsible for implementing the consistency protocol among machines. (The kernel will maintain consistency within a single machine, which may be a tightly coupled multi-processor.) If one wants to use an NFS partition as backing store for the external pager, that shouldn't be a problem since it will only happen on a single machine. If another machine wants data that has been paged onto the NFS partition, it has to go through the external pager protocol rather than NFS. Sincerely, Zalman Stern Internet: zs01+@andrew.cmu.edu Usenet: I'm soooo confused... Information Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
floyd@smoke.BRL.MIL (Floyd C. Wofford) (11/21/89)
In article <17098@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> smiller@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Steven M. Miller) writes: >Is there any reports/papers/etc out there on what was done to port >NFS to Mach? > >-Steve I know of no reports, but BBN has a machine which runs both Mach and NFS. The generic name is Butterfly.
george@jones.cis.ohio-state.edu (George M. Jones) (11/21/89)
In article <11658@smoke.BRL.MIL> floyd@smoke.BRL.MIL (Floyd C. Wofford) writes: In article <17098@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> smiller@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Steven M. Miller) writes: >Is there any reports/papers/etc out there on what was done to port >NFS to Mach? > >-Steve I know of no reports, but BBN has a machine which runs both Mach and NFS. ^^^^ ^^^^ The generic name is Butterfly. Sort of. From what I understand they took a very early release from CMU (release 0 ?) and have pretty much done their own thing with it ever since, not tracking CMU changes. As of the next release they are dropping support for tasks and ports, and never had threads (C-threads anyhow) and are changing the name to nX. Depending on on your interests though you might want to get in touch with them. They have done extensive work with the memory managment code (has anyone else tried to put a Unix-like OS on a NUMA machine ?) and did their own NFS port. For starters you can try reaching them at bf-questions@bbn.com...which I think is intended largly for customer support, but I don't think they will be TOO annoyed at a request for information. I could be wrong :-) ---George Jones -=- OSU Computer & Inf. Science 2036 Neil Ave.,Columbus,Ohio 43210. 614-292-7325 george@cis.ohio-state.edu or ...!osu-cis!george "When goods don't cross borders, armies will" ---Frederic Bastiat
bolosky@cs.rochester.edu (Bill Bolosky) (11/22/89)
>code (has anyone else tried to put a Unix-like OS on a NUMA machine ?) I know of three examples: Alan Cox and Rob Fowler's PLATINUM kernel implements a Mach-like VM system on the Butterfly from which one could build a Unix-like system if one were so inclined; the Psyche group here at Rochester also has a kernel which could potentially support unix-like operations; and Bob Fitzgerald, Dan Poff and I ported Mach to a NUMA machine called the IBM ACE Multiprocessor Workstation. PLATINUM and the ACE Mach effort are described in "The Implementation of a Coherent Memory Abstraction on a NUMA Multiprocessor: Experiences with PLATINUM" and "Simple But Effective Techniques for NUMA Memory Management," respectively, both of which will be presented at ACM SIGOPS SOSP in December. >---George Jones > >-=- >OSU Computer & Inf. Science 2036 Neil Ave.,Columbus,Ohio 43210. 614-292-7325 >george@cis.ohio-state.edu or ...!osu-cis!george >"When goods don't cross borders, armies will" >---Frederic Bastiat Bill Bolosky bolosky@cs.rochester.edu