[OpenAFS-devel] Re: openafs / opendfs collaboration

[Ivan Popov]

Hi Tom!

On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 04:46:14PM -0500, Tom Keiser wrote:
> Secondly, I know this is a rather drastic proposal, but is it time to
> consider splitting the cache manager out of individual filesystem clients?

What do you call a filesystem client and a cache manager in this context?

I am afraid that different people (including myself) may think about
very different things.

> If the interfaces are abstract enough, we should be able to have multiple
> distributed fs's using the same cache manager API.

Do you mean any besides AFS and DFS?

> help reduce the amount of in-kernel code for which each
> project is responsible.  Anyone else think this is feasible?

Do you mean in-kernel cache management? Then probably no.
Both filesystems and kernels are of great variety.

If you mean a more general "cache bookkeeping library", then possibly yes,
but still you'll get differences depending on how FSs and OSs distribute
functionality between kernel and user space in a filesystem client.

If you mean the upcall interface (a common kernel module for different
filesystems), then probably no - it reflects both the corresponding filesystem
semantics and the corresponding kernel architecture...

Though, less demanding filesystems can be happy with "foreign" kernel
modules - like podfuk-smb or davfs2 using the Coda module.

My 2c,
--
Ivan