[OpenAFS-devel] how can we contribute the development of OpenAFS?

[Harald Barth]

>   	I am Weisong Shi, an assistant professor of Department of Computer 
> Science, and Wayne State University.  We are very interested in  using 
> OpenAFS in our on-going reserach project. I am wondering how can we 
> contribute our work to this community.

Write code, the more the merrier ;-) More seriously, there are some
issues which might need improvement. I don't think there is a
coordinated "wanted features" list, the TODO in arla gives only some
hints.

Features/improvement which *I* would like and come to my mind right away:
      
      Rx, the transport level could need some performance enhancements
      or could be replaced entirely

      There is omgoing work for the transport level encryption rxkad

      Support for encryption hardware at the server

      Memory cache: More testing and probably more debugging needed.

      File server backend: It would be nice if there would be a
      possibility to add different storage backends.

      Volserver - fileserver interaction with signals and sockets 
      could be replaced with something more thread-friendly.

      Volserver threading would be nice

But there is of course more. Is there any particular area you
have in mind contributing?

> Another realted question. Does the Linux support AFS now? If yes, which 
> one is used, Arla or OpenAFS?

Yes, both AFS flavours support Linux. However, after the latest fuzz
around syscalls, it is not quite clear how much some Linuxes
(especially RH kernels) want to support OpenAFS and Arla. I use Arla
and OpenAFS on Linux on a daily basis and yes, it works.

Harald.