A Comparison of the Vnode and Sprite File System Architectures

This paper compares the vnode architecture found in SunOS with the internal file system interfaces used in the Sprite distributed file system implementation. The emphasis of the comparison is on generalized support for remote access to file system resources, which include peripheral devices and IPC communication channels as well as regular files. A strong separation of the internal naming and I/O interfaces is exploited in Sprite to easily provide remote access to all of these resources. In contrast, the vnode interface mixes naming and I/O operations in a single interface, making generalized remote access more awk-