Other servers

Most of the remaining translators may fairly be filed under `miscellaneous'. For example, there is a null server which provides /dev/null and /dev/zero. The fifo and new-fifo translators provide named pipes and the ifsock server provides a BSD-style sockets interface.

There are also some `toy' servers: devport, fwd and magic. One might be tempted to categorise the NFS server task as a server since many implementations of NFS place the server inside the kernel in an effort to improve performance, but conceptually it lies outside the kernel activities in ordinary Unix so I would consider this wrong. Of course one of the effects of breaking the kernel up in this manner is to blur the distinction between kernel-provided services and user level services.