NFS: the early years

Posted Jun 24, 2022 13:26 UTC (Fri) by bfields (subscriber, #19510)
Parent article: NFS: the early years

A lot of the original papers are readable and interesting, by the way. Two off the top of my head:

http://www.cs.siue.edu/~icrk/514_resources/papers/sandber... also introduces the VFS: "In order to build the NFS into the UNIX 4.2 kernel in a user transparent way, we decided to add a new interface to the kernel which separates generic filesystem operations from specific filesystem implementations."

https://archive.org/details/1989-conference-proceedings-w... starting p. 53 (there has to be a better link) introduces the DRC; it's interesting that the correctness improvements are described as a "beneficial side effect", with the main purpose increased bandwidth.

NFS: the early years

Posted Jun 25, 2022 11:17 UTC (Sat) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

The article at that second link contains the gem:

> duplicate request processing can result in incorrect results (affectionately called ‘filesystem corruption’ by those not in a filesystem development group).

That's the sort of witticism that would be right at home here in lwn.net.
It goes on to describe a problem which I've heard of before described as "Nulls Frequently Substituted".