On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 4:30 PM, Ciprian Dorin Craciun <ciprian.crac...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 14:32, Dan Cross <cro...@gmail.com> wrote: >> 9P itself is not a stream-oriented >> protocol, nor is it what one would generally call, 'transport >> technology.' > > I would beg to differ on this subject... Because a lot of tools in > the Plan9 environment expose their facilities as 9p file systems, but > expose other semantics than that of "generic" files -- i.e. a > contiguous stream of bytes from start to EOF -- like for example RPC > semantic in case of factotum; thus I would say that 9p is used as a > "session" layer in the OSI terminology. (But as in TCP/IP stack we > don't have other layers between "transport" and "application" I would > call it a "transport" layer in such a context.)
That's one way of looking at it. However, the "file as a stream of bytes" abstraction is mapped onto 9P at a higher layer; 9P itself is really about discrete messages. The canonical "transport" layer in TCP/IP is TCP. But we're arguing semantics at that point; regardless, I think you'd find you hold something of a minority view. - Dan C.