Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!husc6!mit-eddie!genrad!decvax!tektronix!orca!hammer!andrew
From: andrew@hammer.TEK.COM (Andrew Klossner)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: touching devices through RFS
Message-ID: <2733@hammer.TEK.COM>
Date: Wed, 7-Jan-87 18:48:32 EST
Article-I.D.: hammer.2733
Posted: Wed Jan  7 18:48:32 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 8-Jan-87 18:56:48 EST
References: <2086@brl-adm.ARPA> <1559@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Wilsonville, OR
Lines: 20

[]

	"When you open a remote file in RFS, the remote machine does
	the open() and, provided you have the right permissions, all
	works transparently. This works for special files as well as
	regular ones."

What happens when the local machine executes an ioctl?  Does the remote
machine also do an ioctl?  If so, how does it know which of the values
in the structure parameter need to be rearranged because of
byte-ordering and structure alignment differences?

This is a real problem in our environment.  We have a proprietary
remote FS running on both big-endian and little-endian machines.  Bigs
can ioctl to bigs and littles can ioctl to littles, but the two cannot
meet without encoding knowledge of every ioctl into the RFS or
knowledge of the RFS into every device driver.

  -=- Andrew Klossner   (decvax!tektronix!tekecs!andrew)       [UUCP]
                        (tekecs!andrew.tektronix@csnet-relay)  [ARPA]