QNET vs. NFS

Hi,

I am looking at writing resource managers that can be read/written to from networked machines so I was wondering what the differences would be in using qnet or nfs to do this. The 3 main questions are:

  1. Speed and performance
  2. Can you run a shell on a networked machine via NFS like you can via qnet (my guess is no)
  3. Portability (I’m assuming NFS runs on almost any OS - is it possible to set up a qnet interface on another OS)

Thanks

  1. Depends on. If your manager handling “files”, then access it through NFS would be better, as NFS have the concept of “file”, and probably can do cache on file, where QNET can only direct pass every request to your manager. On the other hand, NFS can not access special file. (You obveriously can’t send devctl() through NFS)

  2. No.

  3. No.

Would NFS be able to handle a read/write on a special file?