[OpenAFS-devel] Re: kabi-tracking kmods

[Andrew Deason]

On Wed, 26 Sep 2012 23:00:12 +0200
Stephan Wiesand <stephan.wiesand@desy.de> wrote:

> Another option would be to make the OpenAFS FUSE client fully
> functional.
> 
> Any serious obstacles to that? What would it take?

The major piece of missing functionality is a way to do AFS syscalls
(including pioctls), so aklog, fs, etc can work. My suggestion is using
a socket or something you communicate over, or some special file you
ioctl().  I'm unsure how practical ioctls are in FUSE, but if you can do
it you can probably reuse most of the existing syscall code. (Name the
file /afs/.:fuse_syscall or something.)

Then you have to make the userspace tools somehow be aware of that
alternative method of making syscalls. My suggestion is to have some
environment variable point to the FUSE mount point, and the tool would
try to issue syscalls against that mount point. This could be the
AFSSERVER environment variable but in some slightly different format,
since that's what is already used for syscall redirection with the
translator.

Any other serious obstacles are just stability or speed issues, which I
expect would get better as it was used more.

-- 
Andrew Deason
adeason@sinenomine.net