[OpenAFS-devel] Re: kabi-tracking kmods

[Troy Benjegerdes]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 03:17:04PM +0200, Harald Barth wrote:
> 
> > Another option would be to make the OpenAFS FUSE client fully functional.
> > 
> > Any serious obstacles to that? What would it take?
> 
> Arla, which is a userland/kernel (arlad/nnpfs) implementation has
> existed since before fuse did exist. It should not be that difficult
> to replace nnpfs with fuse if someone likes the fuse kernel module
> better than the nnpfs one. So anyone can take the source code for
> arlad and write the missing parts that it interfaces with libfuse.
> 
> But instead of putting money into a working file system, another ftp
> lookalike command (this week probably cloudftp) is used by the HPC
> community.


My opinion (for the half cent it's worth) is that the obstacle is time
and money. Either we need a group with some free time, or we need a 
foundation with a charter to:

1) provide high-quality testing of various AFS clients & servers

2) promote and seek funding to develop solutions using AFS for the
difficult problems the HPC community faces. This will require integrating
the rxOSD work, an upgrade path to support IPv6 in less than a year, as
well as support for RDMA (aka Infiniband)
( see http://scl.ameslab.gov/Projects/Infrastructure/gridafs.html for 
something I wrote on this subject years ago )

If I had $250,000 to spend, I'd hire the guy that worked on PVFS Infiniband
and deliver both of these by next December.


If I have some help from the mailing lists, and commitments from a couple
of people to contribute, I'll be happy to set up a kickstarter for about 
$50,000 or so to get #1 above done in the next 6 months (which includes 
a working fuse, kafs, or arla client.. I'm not sure which yet. I'm going
to write the tests first and see what code works the best)

.. regarding Arla, has any work been done on the server recently? The 
webpage seems quite stale. I was quite impressed a couple of years ago
when I installed OpenBSD and Arla was installed an 'just worked'.