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Date:      Sat, 20 Sep 1997 22:08:20 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
To:        jamil@counterintelligence.ml.org (Jamil J. Weatherbee)
Cc:        nate@mt.sri.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: UserLand Device Driver Thingys
Message-ID:  <199709202208.PAA00982@usr02.primenet.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970920134235.342A-100000@counterintelligence.ml.org> from "Jamil J. Weatherbee" at Sep 20, 97 01:43:12 pm

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> Are you saying that I can tunnel /dev/cuaa0 from another machine over to
> the local machine seamlessly.

No, he's not.  Unless you are willing to write the tunneling code.

Actually, devfs deals with this.  Because the namespace for devices
is the directory namespace instead of the major/minor namespace in
a devfs system, it should be possible to export devices by exporting
devfs.

The main problems are:

1)	Homogeneous access only -- device paramaters vary between
	OS implementations

2)	NFS is inadequate to the task; it can not proxy ioctl()
	data and data responses between machines.  This is actually
	a failing in NFS, since it's not a real hard problem, so
	long as you break the VFS/NFS connection at the right place,
	but again, it's ngoing to make it unportable.

You could, of course, write your own proxy service and client
device, if you wanted.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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