[OpenAFS-announce] OpenAFS 1.3.81 released

[Derrick J Brashear]

OpenAFS 1.3.81 is now available for download from the openafs.org web
site.

For Windows, 1.3.81 is the new stable release.  This release corrects
issues uncovered by MIT's IS&T division as they have continued to
improve the coverage of their SMB stress testing.  Testing has now
been performed involving 100 simultaneous threads each performing
scripted operations for hours at a time.  The tests were performed
against volumes which were being periodically taken offline.  The
result of this testing several additional deadlocks and performance
bottlenecks were removed.

Other changes of note include:

  * File time stamps are now uniformly reported to Windows in UTC.
    A file copied from NTFS to AFS in January will now report the same
    time stamp in both file systems in June.

  * The AFS Client Service would crash if a physical mass storage
    device was assigned a drive letter by Windows which had previously
    been mapped to AFS via "NET USE".  In this circumstance, invalid
    data requests would be sent to the AFS Client Service.  These are
    now filtered out and rejected.

For UNIX, 1.3.81 is the latest version in the 1.4 release cycle. Starting 
in 1.3.70, platforms with pthreads support provide a volserver which like 
the fileserver and butc backup system uses pthreads. Solaris versions 8 
and above, AIX, IRIX, OpenBSD, Darwin, MacOS and Linux clients support 
large (>2gb) files, and provided fileservers have this option enabled. 
HP-UX may also support large files, but has not yet been verified. We hope 
sites which can do so will make use of 1.3.81 on their UNIX platforms and 
provide feedback to help us fix any remaining issues before 1.4 is 
released.

The UNIX client and server includes a number of updates, including support 
for several new platforms for Linux 2.6, a substantially rewritten MacOS 
10.3 client, and fixes for problems where the bosserver could die after 25 
days, and lwp-using processes could get free() errors.

Known remaining issues involve "dangling vnodes" at unmount time with the 
MacOS 10.3 client, apparent high memory mapping contention on Linux, and a 
possible largefile issue on Linux.

Derrick Brashear
for the OpenAFS gatekeepers