[OpenAFS-announce] OpenAFS 1.5.50 released (Production Version for Windows including UNICODE; Test Version for other platforms)

[Jeffrey Altman]

1.5.50 is the recommended production-ready release of OpenAFS for
Microsoft Windows users.  It supports all Microsoft Windows operating
systems from Windows 2000 through Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 
2008 including both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.  The 1.5.50
release continues the recent efforts at optimizing the performance of 
the Windows client and improving its scalability.

In the 1.5.50 release of OpenAFS for Windows, each of the AFS Client 
Service, the AFS Explorer Shell Extension, and the command-line tools 
are UNICODE character set enabled.  No longer is OpenAFS restricted to 
accessing file system objects whose names can be represented in the 
locale specific OEM code page.  This has significant benefits for end 
users.  Most importantly it permits non-Western languages to now be used 
for file system object names in AFS from Microsoft Windows operating 
systems.  Now that Unicode names are supported, Roaming User Profiles 
and Folder Redirection will no longer fail when a user attempts to store 
an object with a name that cannot be represented in the OEM code page.

For UNIX, Linux, and MacOS X the recommend production-ready release of
OpenAFS is 1.4.7.  The 1.5.39 Windows client is fully compatible with
all AFS server versions.

Please visit http://www.openafs.org/windows.html for up to date
information on the status of the OpenAFS for Windows client.

Windows:

This is the first release since 1.5.39.  This production release
is a major release.  Changes since 1.5.39 include:

  * UNICODE Character Set Support

  * Pioctl interfaces to the cache manager have been refactored
    to provide layering between the SMB specific code and the
    general purpose ioctl operation.

  * Garbage collect dead SMB virtual circuits as soon
    as they are no longer being referenced.  This avoids
    problems with outstanding locks not being dropped
    when the virtual circuit becomes invalid.

  * Remove the IBM Administration Reference documentation
    and replace it with the OpenAFS Command Reference
    Manual.

  * Avoid calling rx_SetDeadTime and rx_SetHardDeadTime
    functions each time a connection is about to be used.
    Do not hold a lock on the rx connection object while
    it is being selected.  This avoids a race between
    threads attempting to set the timeout values and
    removes a bottleneck that was hampering performance.

  * Ensure that the smb directory attribute is set
    for all directory objects.

  * Replace the VC Runtime EXE installer with the MSI
    installer in the NSIS installer scripts


All platforms:

  * volserver puts recloned volumes back online before returning
    the volume to the fileserver, avoiding spurious VNOVOL errors

  * Updated TSM X/Open API support available.

  * Demand Attach fileserver will not crash due to accesses during
    volume cloning.

  * Substantial documentation updates.

  * Demand Attach fileserver state tracking and analyzer tool
    improvements.

  * UAFS userspace cachemanager updates.

  * Corrected support for anti-meltdown protection in the client.

Solaris:

  * Support for updates to OpenSolaris

Linux:

  * Correct dentry revalidation for cross-directory renames.

  * Updated rpm packaging materials for 1.5 release series and
    2.4 kernels.

  * Corrected syscall table probing.

  * NFS translator updates for current kernels.

This release is the recommended production release for all
Microsoft Windows environments.

Source code and binaries can be downloaded from

    http://www.openafs.org/windows.html
    http://www.openafs.org/release/openafs-1.5.50.html

Please send reports of successful deployments to
openafs-info@openafs.org and report problems to openafs-bugs@openafs.org.

Jeffrey Altman
for the OpenAFS Gatekeepers