A Network Filesystem for 2.11BSD

[Warren Toomey]

I decided to go crazy this week and write a network filesystem for 2.11BSD. No, it isn't NFS, it is much simpler. It is slow, at the moment, but it does work.

The repo is here: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/211BSD_Brf/

It is still in the early stages.

Cheers, Warren

[Ville Laitinen]

Brilliant, thanks !! 

next.. shared libraries  ?... oor a distributed fs :D

br,

-V

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[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 3:33 PM Ville Laitinen <vlai...@gmail.com> wrote:

Brilliant, thanks !! 

next.. shared libraries  ?... oor a distributed fs :D

8k is likely too large a 'page' to make shared libraires work...

Warner

 

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[Johnny Billquist]

On 6/26/26 05:14, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 3:33 PM Ville Laitinen <vlai...@gmail.com
> <mailto:vlai...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Brilliant, thanks !!
>
> next.. shared libraries  ?... oor a distributed fs :D
>
>
> 8k is likely too large a 'page' to make shared libraires work...

Well... That's what "pure executables" do, where the read-only text part
of a binary is shared between all copies of the program running...

And other OSes (RSX for example) do have shared libraries, and yes, they
need to be on their own pages. But that's not preventing them from work.
Bot obviously, it can lead to a larger waste of address space as well.

Johnny

>
> Warner
>
> br,
> -V
>
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 7:58 AM Warren Toomey
> <warren...@gmail.com <mailto:warren...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I decided to go crazy this week and write a network filesystem
> for 2.11BSD. No, it isn't NFS, it is much simpler. It is slow,
> at the moment, but it does work.
>
> The repo is here: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/211BSD_Brf/
> <https://github.com/DoctorWkt/211BSD_Brf/>
>
> It is still in the early stages.
>
> Cheers, Warren
>
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[Warren Toomey]

The performance of Brf is improved; it's now about half that of ftp. Given the protocol design, I don't think it can be improved much further. I've made some other improvements and bumped the version number to 0.2. It is quite stable and useful now!

Cheers, Warren

[Warren Toomey]

We're up to Version 1.0. I've improved the throughput for whole-file transfers to match that of ftp. I also fixed a bug where the server left stale client connections open, which caused 2.11BSD to slow down. It works, it's stable, and I think there's not much left to to.

Hope some people find this useful!