[OpenAFS-devel] native windows client announcement

[Eric Williams]

recently, i have been working on a native windows openafs client.  i am at
the point of a mostly-stable, mostly-functional, read-only, anonymous
client.

the client connects to windows through the io manager (using the
installable filesystem kernel driver interface), rather than the
abstracted smb layer.  this should, in the end, allow faster access, more
functionality, and better integration with windows, in general.  its
placement into the kernel gives more flexibility for security and earler
loading at boot time.

the ifs-layer kernel driver directly answers any io requests, so this
prevents smb networking failures (the frustrating "network drive invalid"
errors, etc.) from affecting afs.  the standard cache manager code runs in
userspace (as usual), for security reasons.  the events in userland are
dispatched much like the usual vnode ops, so the userland code lost all of
its smb-bloat flavor and much of its windows flavor.

code will be made available in useable form as soon as possible, and i
will continue to develop in my spare time.

eric williams