One of the nicest aspects of this system is a shared heap model which
permits processes to use mmap() (as opposed to sbrk() to create and share
data heaps. The problem is while this works very nicely if the
co-operating processes are on the same machine, it fails under NFS because
user processes on a client machine cannot tell the NFS kernel daemon on
that machine to flush all cached data back to the physical file on the
NFS server. How hard would it be to implement an additional system call
[say nfssync()] to perform this function? Typically this would not impinge
on NFS filesystem performance, as this (slow) operation would only need to
be called when a process has finished modifying a shared heap in order to
provide up-to-date data for other clients of that heap.
Any help would be appreciated. I am quite happy to add this modification
to the kernel myself, given sufficient guidance!
FYI you can see the sort distributed systems we have been building, and a
few example applications at the PUPS Web Site http://fabre.oum.ox.ac.uk
Regards
Mark O'Neill
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