Re: Why GNU Mach is so different?

[Farid Hajji]

> > > > Network-wide unique identifiers like task-IDs, ports, etc... are a nice
> > > > thing to have. One idea may be to organize all nodes of a collective
> > > > in a distributed kind of (hurdisch) filesystem. IDs would then be
> > > > simple paths and could be located with some kind of distributed
> > > > lookup() functionality:
> > > 
> > > It was always my plan to have a single IP address for a collective.  
> > > (The collective might use IP for communication between its component
> > > systems, but those addresses would be entirely internal.)
> > 
> > You certainly want to assign a multicast IP address to the collective,
> > right?
> 
> No, that's not necesary.  At least in IPv4, multicast is too uncertain
> to rely on.
Hmmm... I use multicasting on *BSD boxes very heavily since years
and it works flawlessly. Cisco used to have some bugs in their PIM
Sparse tree pruning implementation, but they fixed that approx. 9
months ago. I used multicasting accross the public Internet without
problems (but alas not so intensively).

Of course, I can't say anything about the pfinet IP stack implementation.
If that proves to be faulty, it may be a good idea to grab the TCP/IP
code from, say, FreeBSD and wrap that into a bsd_pfinet translator.
Sure, it will only happen when it is really needed ;-)

> But there are other tricks that can work. :)  
Of course, one can always simulate multicasting or avoid it completely.
That is not a big issue.

Please tell us more about collectives. That is a very hot topic!

-Farid.

-- 
Farid Hajji -- Unix Systems and Network Admin | Phone: +49-2131-67-555
Broicherdorfstr. 83, D-41564 Kaarst, Germany  | farid.hajji@ob.kamp.net
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