Research UNIX(R) Filesystems

File system types were introduced into our version of UNIX (R) several years ago. This is and abstraction, similar to the device drivers, for implementing any object for which the natural operations are read, write, etc. The early applications were a network file system and new hooks for debugging. Recently we've added new networking services, and exploited file system types to clean up the organization of the kernel. This talk describes these effects of file system types, and the evolution of the network file system to one that talks to VAXes, SUNs, and our Cray.