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From: vjs@calcite.rhyolite.com (Vernon Schryver)
Subject: Re: Whats wrong with Linux networking ???
Message-ID: <CuBo9r.A8I@calcite.rhyolite.com>
Organization: Rhyolite Software
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 1994 14:01:03 GMT
References: <321djn$n1o@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM> <9408081710.01@rmkhome.com> <STEINAR.HAUG.94Aug9212125@bokfink.runit.sintef.no>
Lines: 27

In article <STEINAR.HAUG.94Aug9212125@bokfink.runit.sintef.no> Steinar.Haug@runit.sintef.no (Steinar Haug) writes:
>> I don't know.  I've been pleasantly surprised by SCO NFS, it's not the
>> fastest, but it seems fairly robust, and TCP/IP works as expected.
>
>I don't know the state of SCO NFS (and TCP/IP in general) today, but when
>we got an SCO box a few years ago (needed for one particular project), it
>was horrible. Only 64 K inodes on the SCO box, so the inodes on the NFS
>file systems from our Suns and HPs were taken modulo 65536. Great fun. And
>the SCO TCP/IP/NS couldn't handle standard 8 kByte NFS reads/writes, so we
>had to turn it down to 1 kByte.
> ...

Restrictions on the max I-number to 16 bits commonly come from the fact
that System V Release 3 (and before) have only a 16-bit field for the
I-number in the stat() structure.  If your upper filesystem layers don't
have more than 16-bits for an I-number, it's a pain to kludge things
for NFS.

Many PC Ethernet boards are too crippled to handle more than 1 back-to-back
Ethernet packet, and so cannot handle the stream of packets that is an
8KB NFS/UDP/IP/Ethernet packets.

In other words, those problems are not really SCO's fault.  Blame AT&T/USL
and your Ethernet card vendor.


Vernon Schryver    vjs@rhyolite.com