[OpenAFS] 2.6 linux kernel support; afs from ramdisk

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Mon, 9 Aug 2004, Dr A V Le Blanc wrote:

> On Saturday August 7, Christoph Hellwig, a Linux kernel developer,
> gave a presentation at Leeds on Linux filesystems.  He said that
> AFS was a buggy filesystem with a very messy code base, and that
> people should stay away from openafs, which was particularly
> unreliable.  I don't want to blame Christoph, who seems to have

Would you blame a president if his security advisors gave him bad advice, 
and he acted on it without checking otherwise? While your words may or may 
not reflect the position of your employer, your wife, etc, one would hope 
they reflect your own position, and thus you are the only person to blame 
for them.

Of course, you might remember that around 2.4.10 the Linux VM system was 
revamped, and there were some problems... would it be fair for me to tell 
you to avoid the Linux kernel because it's buggy, and instead use Windows?

And my recollection was that the first syscall hook patch I did (which at 
the time was just copied from the nfssrvctl hook already in the Linux 
kernel) drew the least helpful response from none other than Mr Hellwig.
I might be wrong, but if I am, it's certainly not 180 degrees wrong.

> picked up some anti-AFS feeling from some other kernel programmers,
> but shouldn't we be doing something or other to counter this bad
> press?

Probably. I couldn't tell you what. I'd love to hear some thoughts on it.
About all I can think of is the problem of the other solutions in this 
problem space, and pretty much everything interesting that I see is either 
single platform, or less useful on platforms other than its "primary" 
platform. OpenAFS 1.3.70 will probably have binary builds for more than 20 
platforms when you count multiple OS versions.

-D