OSDev.org

In my OS, every file in the system is currently addressed via a pair of integers that correspond to the driver's 32 bit pid and the 64 bit inode number of the file within that driver. What if, instead, I could assign an IP address to every file? I'm not at all experienced in networking, but from reading around it seems like IPv6 has a "node-local scope" for addresses which may work in this situation. Then, if I wanted to, I could make my IPC and network stack (which doesn't exist yet) seamless. Even more interesting, it would theoretically (via IP masquerading of some sort) assign every file (and device and process) on a network a unique, uniform address, and create a distributed system for free. Does anyone know enough about IPv6 to tell whether or not this could work?

Actually, I guess this is a bad idea: it's not like I would want every file to have to act like a complete node. It would make more sense to have every file described by an IP, pid, and inode, and use an extended packet format, and use loopback by default as the IP. If anyone has an interesting related idea, feel free to discuss it I guess.

Some variation on it would make implementing a distributed filesystem easier, assuming each node didn't need a copy of every available file (aside from cache).

I know, but my point is that a making special protocol on the transport layer that redirects to a specific file would be better than assigning every file an IP and doing some sort of NAT to communicate with other nodes.