[OpenAFS] OpenAFS on SuSE 7.0 anyone?

[Markus Alt]

Hi all,

there has been some talk about other distributions apart from Red Hat
lately (Mandrake, Debian, etc.). Now I'd like to know if someome has
ever successfully compiled OpenAFS on the latest version of SuSE Linux,
i.e. SuSE 7.0.

>From the experience I've made so far, I know that this isn't
straightforward. There are a few patches that SuSE added to the pristine
kernel sources and these patches also prevent the "regular" AFS client
from starting successfully on SuSE 7.0. (Up to 6.4 this was no problem.)
It looks like memory management - which has changed in 7.0 to support
memory > 2 GB - is the culprit, at least as I understand it so far. I've
already contacted Transarc's product support, but as there's only
official support for Red Hat, they couldn't help me further.

Now, when trying to compile OpenAFS on SuSE 7.0, the process exits at
this stage:

gcc -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-strength-reduce -pipe -m486
-malign-loops=2 -malign-jumps=2 -malign-functions=2 -D__KERNEL__ 
-DCPU=586 -DKERNEL -D_KERNEL -DMODULE -DAFS_SMP -I. -I../ -c
../afs/osi_vnodeops.c;
../afs/osi_vnodeops.c: In function `afs_linux_readpage':
../afs/osi_vnodeops.c:1135: structure has no member named `offset'
../afs/osi_vnodeops.c: In function `afs_linux_updatepage':
../afs/osi_vnodeops.c:1265: structure has no member named `offset'
make[4]: *** [osi_vnodeops.o] Error 1
make[4]: Leaving directory
`/build/openafs-1.0.1/i386_linux22/obj/libafs/MODLOAD-2.2.16-MP'
make[3]: *** [linux_compdirs] Error 2
make[3]: Leaving directory
`/build/openafs-1.0.1/i386_linux22/obj/libafs'
make[2]: *** [libafs] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/build/openafs-1.0.1'
make[1]: *** [install] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/build/openafs-1.0.1'
make: *** [all] Error 2

The message "structure has no member named `offset'" leads to the same
conclusion as above: The memory management in 7.0 has no more "offset"
field in the struct "page" within /usr/src/linux/include/linux/mm.h - in
contrast to 6.4.

So finally: Has anyone already created some patches to either the
OpenAFS sources or the SuSE 7.0 kernel sources in order to compile
OpenAFS successfully? I will as well contact SuSE on this issue to see
what they say. Of course, I could also use the vanilla kernel sources to
build my kernel. But a) there are some really useful patches in the SuSE
kernel sources and b) IMHO the other distributions will sooner or later
also change their memory management to support bigger RAM size. At the
latest then the OpenAFS sources will have to be adopted to support this.

If someone has information he's willing to share or is also interested
in getting OpenAFS to run on SuSE 7.0, then I'd like to hear from it.

TIA,
Markus

-- 
Markus Alt
IBM Lab Boeblingen, Germany
altmark@de.ibm.com