On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 06:25:19AM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote: > i think the general idea is that if you want to do this between > arbitrary machines, you provide a 9p interface. you can think > of 9p as a channel with a predefined set of messages. acme > does this. kernel devices do this. > > however inferno provides file2chan > http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/2/sys-file2chan.html. > of course, somebody has to provide the 9p interface, even > if that's just posting a fd to /srv. > > if you wanted to do something like file2chan in plan 9 and c, you're > going to have to marshal your data. this means that chanconnect > as specified is impossible. [...] > > after whittling away problem cases, i think one is left with pipes, > and it seems pretty clear how to connect things so that > chan <-> pipe <-> chan. one could generalize to multiple > machines by using tools like cpu(1).
inferno's file2chan is local too, just giving a simple interface to handling plain reads & writes on a file. unless i've been using it wrong. what i like about file2chan is that you can return your own error strings. as far is i know, that's not possible with pipes. if it is possible, i'm very interested to learn how it's done. mjl
