Any previous discussions of network block devices?

[cpiker]

One of the most useful tools I've encountered for working with vintage 8088 hardware is etherdfs. Often the old hard drive is dead, but with etherdfs and a 3COM card I'm able to boot from a floppy and then pivot to the emulated C: drive just by setting a few environment variables. In this setup most of the software lives on the remote server, which is super handy when old equipment fails.

Since ELKS has a nice VFS layer, has anyone discussed hooking in some sort of remote filesystem capability?

Nothing fancy like NFS2, but maybe a raw Ethernet frame protocol that provides a block device. I presume the current filesystem layer was written with the assumption that it is the only thing changes bytes on a block device. Invalidating the current buffers would need to be part of the protocol, but even a read-only remote device would provide some support for disk-less clients. This would only provide link-local remote drives, but that's more than good enough to have fun with an old machine.

If anyone knows of any links to old discussions on this topic I'd would like to read them.

Also, I'm curious to know if the current structure of the network and filesystem modules are sufficiently compatible to provide a platform for a network based block devices.

[parabyte]

I have actually been playing with nfs in elks! at least a pale imitation of it, "homebrewed"

Thanks for sharing VFS, i need a few weeks to understand vfs, will take a look myself :)

[cpiker]

Neat!

Well, I finally got an etherlink III working in the ole Leading Edge, so theoretically I can test NFS code if you're interested. Given the limitations of XT class hardware I'm not convinced that NFS itself is the way to go for remote disk space, but happy to try it out.

I still have no hard drive so any network filesystem beats being limited to floppy drives.

My other end point is a Rocky Linux machine. I think modern Linux still supports NFS 2, but haven't tried it yet. How similar to NFS 2 is your home brew system?

[parabyte]

im super super bogged down and away form home working, eager to get back to my 8086 hardware project at home! soon as i get home will put it up on github, warning though its a huge pile of mess, its literally just enough nfs to get files onto my elks system. lots of stubs!