Continued use of the ONC RPC protocol seems to make sense given that it is already on standards track. The current draft needs to include more comparisons with existing distributed filesystems. Spencer then moved on to present an overview of the Strawman protocol document. This is a rough protocol specification intended to provide a nexus for proposals relating to specific protocol features. The strawman protocol integrates the mount and file locking protocols into a single NFS protocol.
File attributes are an extensible set, individually gettable and settable.
NFS operations can be aggregated into compound requests to provide more implementation flexibility and address network latency. Integrated file locking operations utilize leases to avoid the need for server callbacks or status monitoring. The strawman leaves many open issues in the implementation of locking, minor versioning, required attributes, Access Control Lists and security mechanisms. The future evolution of the strawman will be guided by the final requirements document and the charter that derives from it. NFS version 4 must perform well enough to provide very high bandwidth to servers with many terabytes of data.