[OpenAFS-devel] Question about inode base fileserver vs namei base fileserver

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Friday, March 10, 2006 01:11:39 AM -0500 Pedro Perez 
<pperez@opensourcetechnologies.net> wrote:

> Which of the two fileservers is the default been built when configure is
> ran without any options?
>
> I know that in Linux openafs builds the namei fileserver by default
> (https://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-devel/2004-October/011062.ht
> ml), but I am not sure about any other OS.
>
> The main reason I am asking is because there is a ./configure option
> called:
>     --enable-namei-fileserver
>
> which says:
>     "force compilation of namei fileserver in preference to inode
> fileserver"
>
> It appears from the help message that the inode base fileserver is still
> the default when building openafs.
>
> On the other hand, if the namei base fileserver is been build by default,
> then there should not be a reason to "force" anything.

The namei fileserver is supported on all platforms.
The inode fileserver is supported only on some platforms, but is generally 
believed to provide better performance on those platforms.

Thus, the inode fileserver is the default on platforms where it is 
supported, and on those platforms, --enable-namei-fileserver can be used to 
build the namei server instead.

Someday, maybe we'll have runtime-pluggable fileserver back ends, and the 
configure option can go away entirely.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@cmu.edu>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA