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Showing posts from August, 2009

lab 104 - ducts: bi-directional mount channels

NAME lab 104 - ducts: bi-directional mount channels NOTES Hi there, I want to talk to you about ducts. Are your ducts old fashion, out of date? In this lab, I'll walk through a little facility I built to allow me to have bi-directional mounts over a single file descriptor channel. The nature of the way I access my Blue Gene environment requires me to do an awful lot over a single communications channel. I wanted the ability to both access the target node's file system while simultaneously exporting mine, while only using a single file descriptor. To facilitate this, I wrote a little 9P-knowledgeable multiplexor which directs T-msgs to an export thread and R-msgs to a mount thread while multiplexing the responses from those threads back onto the same file descriptor. The initial implementation of the base mechanism was relatively simple until I had to start considering how to clean things up when I started unmounting directories on one side or both. The liberal use of sys-