Trivial File Transfer Protocol

[lwa at MIT-MRCLEAN.ARPA]

From:  Larry Allen <lwa at MIT-MRCLEAN.ARPA>

The TFTP that's been supplied with 4.2 bsd is an old version, originally from
4.1a, which doesn't work at all as distributed.  We've modified it here to
work properly, if you're interested.

I think you miss the point of TFTP, however.  It's intended to be a @i[Trivial]
File Transfer protocol, suitable for implementation (for example) in bootstrap
ROMs, on small personal computers, and so forth.  It uses a very simple, ack-
per-packet scheme for windowing.  The result is performance running about
1/3 to 1/4 that of FTP.  You certainly should not expect any performance
improvement from using it.

A couple of other minor factual points: TFTP actually uses UDP (the user
datagram protocol), rather than running directly on IP.  UDP provides the
process-level addressing ("ports") which IP lacks.  Both TFTP and FTP
run in user mode, so all data being transferred must be copied from the
kernel out to user space and back in to the kernel.
					-Larry