[OpenAFS-devel] root via openafs?

[Dean Anderson]

The problem is that afs sites expects to be mounted at /afs/sitename/.  
But pivot_root usually takes an inode/vnode, if I recall. Once you have 
afs going, you should be able to pivot into anything that has public 
permissions.

I think afs caching could be useful for diskless, and indeed nfsv4
includes caching.  However, the whole diskless idea kind of went by the
wayside when disks became cheap and large. Diskless was invented in an
era when 100meg was all that shipped with a cheap unix workstation.  
Now, you can 32Gig on a key-fob flash card. So why go diskless except
during boot?  Since ram is so cheap, one can usually download the whole
mini-root into ram. Even the $50 wifi hubs have 8, 16 meg or 32meg ram.
Those unix workstations of 1991 had 8 or 16 meg ram, but little boxes
still measured ram in kb.

So, I'm wondering why you think diskless/flashless is still worthwhile
past installation?  I can however see the utility of read-only usr on
flash-based machines, tho.  Don't let me dissuade you, tho.  I rather
doubt anyone's done this, but I'd like to know how it works out... If
nothing else, its probably a good example of clever kernel hacking at
its finest.

		--Dean

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Julius wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> ive used "root via nfsv3" and was very disappointed with the speed, also
> encryption is not possible.
> 
> Currently my system boots the kernel from usb and than mount / via nfs,
> is it possible to have the openafs client in the initrd environment and
> use pivot_root to make it the real root?
> 
> found the pivot_root idea here:
> http://ltsp.mirrors.tds.net/pub/ltsp/docs/ltsp-4.1-en.html#AEN67
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Julius
> 
> _______________________________________________
> OpenAFS-devel mailing list
> OpenAFS-devel@openafs.org
> https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-devel
> 
> 

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