Re: [OpenAFS-port-freebsd] Re: afs port

[Robert Watson <rwatson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 31 Mar 2001, Johan Danielsson wrote:

> > I don't know the internals enough to answer that, but judging from
> > the AFS Installation Guide, the kernel mods are pre-requisite to
> > running the server processes.
> 
> That's because the fileserver uses special system calls to bypass the
> ufs namespace when allocating files. Any first, sane, implementation
> should probably go the linux way and circumvent this problem. 

Another thing that would be very interesting to look at is using IFS for
client and server file storage: IFS is a subset of FFS done by Adrian Chad
<adrian@xxxxxxxxxxx>.  What IFS does is use inode numbers to provide a
single directory namespace in the root of the fs, removing the requirement
that expensive synchronous namespace operations occur, allowing the
application to provide these meta-data services itself.  He did the work
specifically with Squid in mind, but it could easily be adapted for use
under OpenAFS or Coda.  At least on the server, this would remove the
requirement for special kernel code, as low-cost file store services would
be available in userland.  The client would continue to need a kernel
module, but container files could likewise be stored in an IFS file
system.  Of course, if this is used, it would be interesting to compare
the performance results with IFS and the performance results of using the
kernel module for the server.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project
robert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx      NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services



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