The UNIX eighth edition network file system
Peter J. Weinberger · 1985
This talk will summarize the design goals for, performance of, and troubles with the eighth edition UNIX network file system. The principal goal was to make available the file systems of other machines to programs running on one machine (the client) without changing the semantics of system calls. The network file system did not need to provide for execution of programs on other machines, since our network already had a mechanism for that. The requirement that the semantics of system calls be preserved has several implications: names of remote files must be syntactically and semantically the same as names of local files; the current directory can be either a local directory or a remote directory, so the kernel has to be modified. These goals have been met. No program had to be recompiled to use remote files, and except for bugs, and a few subtle points discussed below, programs cannot distinguish between local and remote files.This is an abstract of a longer paper which will include the results of the current reimplementation.