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Date:      Fri, 18 Jul 2003 16:18:37 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Marc Ramirez <marc.ramirez@bluecirclesoft.com>
To:        Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Communications kernel -> userland
Message-ID:  <20030718160451.I61759@www.bluecirclesoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307181253290.14696-100000@InterJet.elischer.org>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307181253290.14696-100000@InterJet.elischer.org>

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On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Julian Elischer wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Marc Ramirez wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Daniel Eischen wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Marc Ramirez wrote:
> > > > I asked this in -questions, but got no response; sorry for the repost.
> > > >
> > > > I have a device driver that needs to make requests for data from a
> > > > userland daemon.  What's the preferred method for doing this in 4.8R and
> > > > 5.1R?  I'm assuming the answer is Unix-domain sockets...
> > >
> > > I think you got it backwards.  Not that you can't
> > > do what you want to do, but it's usually the other
> > > way around.
> > >
> > > Your daemon should listen on the device (blocking
> > > ioctl or read) and send data to the device when
> > > it is ready for it (using write or ioctl).
> >
> > Sorry - I'll be more specific.
> >
> > I have a remote datastore that I want to present as a filesystem.  There
> > are two parts to this: fetching raw data over the network, and doing some
> > processing on the data.  For purposes of maintainability, I'd like to do
> > as little of this as possible inside the kernel, so I've currently got a
> > daemon to fetch and process the data, and then pipes it over a socket to
> > the kernel FS layer.
> >
> > Anyway I'm trying to move on from the "accurate" stage of development to
> > the "accurate and speedy" stage, so I'm asking around... :)
>
> Isn't that what the 'portalfs' is for?

Actually, I just read the manpage, and I'm a little confused on what
portalfs is for... :) but it appears that it's just for letting you use
establish network connections via the FS... maybe... (plus that 'fs'
thing).

I actually have large sets of data that I dynamically want to present as a
hierarchy (even different hierarchies based on, say, environment
variables, but I haven had quite that need yet). I'm constantly writing
software to do all kinds of wierd things to this data that's in several
big blobs.  It'll save me much time in the long run if I can just
dynamically view it as an FS.  I worry about regularizing the data and the
users worry about find and perl scripts.

Marc.

--
Marc Ramirez
Blue Circle Software Corporation
513-688-1070 (main)
513-382-1270 (direct)
www.bluecirclesoft.com



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