[OpenAFS-devel] Re: AFS ... or equivalent ...

[Rune]

Hi Marc,

> >Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> >
> >>Does anyone know if there is any serious work being done to get AFS 
> >>working under FreeBSD?  I have a large project that I'm working on that 
> >>AFS (or something equivalent) would be *very* useful for, but we're 
> >>trying to keep it as FreeBSD-pure as possible ...

What are the crucial properties of the file system needed by
your project? Wonder if Coda would fit the bill.

(I have got also a large project, explicitely relying on Coda.)

Even though Coda is not an "equivalent" to AFS, it shares many of its very
useful properties, having the same design roots as AFS, while better suited
for mobile computing.

Coda has its own strength and limitations, for example, it doesn't do file
locking.

It suffers also from kernel changes (see below) but my guess is that it is
a lot less of a challenge to maintain the kernel part of Coda in good shape
compared to AFS. The amount of work should be comparable to older Arla.
The newest version of Arla seems to have dropped support for FreeBSD,
presumably because of moving more functionality into the kernel, like OpenAFS
does.

Unfortunately, according to http://coda.wikidev.net/SupportedPlatforms:
(presumably related to 6.x, wonder if it is solved in 7.0?)
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There were several sweeping changes in freebsd, and in the case where the developers didn't exactly know how to solve it for Coda, they just removed the related code. For instance, they don't support vget with a device/inode number pair anymore, so they simply removed the complete coda_open codepath. As a result it is impossible to open any files or directories in /coda with the current fbsd kernel module.

Patches for -CURRENT that should help can be found at http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=fbsd-coda.git;a=summary .

There is also http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=fbsd-coda.git;a=shortlog;h=jaharkes/pending , a set of patches that was sent to the fbsd developers who supposedly ignored them. You can grab the snapshot of the most recent version which should untar to fbsd-coda.git, then move /usr/sys/coda aside and replace with a symlink to where you untarred fbsd-coda.
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On Sun, 13 Jan 2008, Jason C. Wells wrote:
> >Sorry for the spam and cross posts. It seems like the interest in OpenAFS 
> >on FreeBSD is building.  I hope that this message will put the right 
> >people in touch with each other and that maybe a concerted effort to port 
> >OpenAFS to FreeBSD will arise.

I want to hopefully make right people aware that there is an interest
in Coda on FreeBSD.

Wonder who has the influence to make Coda a "first-class citizen" of FreeBSD?

Best regards,
Rune