[OpenAFS-devel] Solaris afs.rc file damage

[Tom Keiser]

On 4/12/07, Dale Ghent <daleg@umbc.edu> wrote:
> On Apr 11, 2007, at 5:42 PM, Dean Anderson wrote:
>
> > So, I suspect the question should be: Could the afs kernel module be
> > turned into a driver with an ioctl?  There's a lot in there, and if
> > anything breaks the general premise that a system call can be cast
> > as an
> > ioctl, this would probably be it...
>
> This would cure a lot of problems for us. Making OpenAFS Zones-
> compatible in Solaris is one of them.
>
> A afs psudeo device in Solaris would be the best of both worlds... we
> don't have to play grab-ass with syscall numbers every other Solaris
> rev, it's easier to implement/maintain, it's still our own interface,
> and we do things the same way that pretty much everything else in the
> world does it.
>
> I betcha we can also register "/dev/afs" with Sun so that they don't
> step on that namespace. Either way it would be far easier than asking
> them to put aside a reserved syscall number for a 3rd party app such
> as ours. Asking for *that* would probably gets us a "not no, but hell
> no" response.
>
> So, yeah, the AFS syscall is an anachronism that just needs to have a
> fork stuck in it, plain and simple.
>

I can't agree with this until benchmarks show the performance
degredation of moving everything to ioctls is not statistically
significant.  There are changes going into the tree which will make
afs_syscall a signficant factor in system performance for all aspects
of OpenAFS.

-- 
Tom Keiser
tkeiser@gmail.com