Namespace file descriptors [LWN.net]

Namespace file descriptors

Posted Jul 27, 2011 16:31 UTC (Wed) by renzo (guest, #77450)
In reply to: Namespace file descriptors by ebiederm
Parent article: Namespace file descriptors

I think it would be simpler for programmers to have network stacks on the file system as special files.

I proposed this approach two years ago at FOSDEM. msocket is similar
to socketat but it has a pathname instead of a file descriptor as its
first argument.
If the network stacks were special files, sysadm may provide more than one
stack to the users, each application can decide which stack to use.
A "default" stack can be defined for backwards compatibility: the "socket" syscall uses the default stack.

for details see: http://wiki.virtualsquare.org/wiki/index.php/Multi_stack_...

and: http://archive.fosdem.org/2009/schedule/events/ipn_msockets

renzo

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Namespace file descriptors

Posted Oct 2, 2011 16:20 UTC (Sun) by uriel (guest, #20754) [Link]

Plan 9 always used a file system interface to its network stack, and you could mount multiple ip stacks, and remote network stacks, and 'virtual network stacks' (eg., providing tunneling to a remote non-plan9 system using sshnet).

See:

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/
http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/3/ip