TFTP File System

Thu May 23 12:13:58 1996
Yasushi Saito

Overview

TFTP file system(TFTPFS from now on) is a file system that uses tftp(trivial ftp) protocol to retrieve a file. It uses the tftp code provided by SAL, so no extra network support extensions are needed.

TFTPFS is a static extension(it's loaded when system boots), and it is automatically mounted on / on system startup.

It is currently the primary mean to load extensions into the system.

TFTPFS uses low level SAL code for networking. On SAL based on DEC OSF/1, tftp is implemented by polling, and this means that the whole system stops working while you are transfering a file using tftp. And, tftp sometimes gets hung.

Because of these problems, many people think using TFTP as a file system is not the right thing to do, so we are planning to switch to NFS soon.

Using the service

TFTPFS is mounted on / at the system startup.

Caveats

It's read only.
It doesn't support directory operations. You can't do ls.

yasushi@cs.washington.edu