[OpenAFS] Red Hat Linux beta kernel implements AFS?

[Rudolph T Maceyko]

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My post to limbo-users yielded the following missing documentation.

-Rudy

--On Tuesday, August 20, 2002 23:55:41 -0400 Derrick J Brashear 
<shadow@dementia.org> wrote:

> fs not terribly useful since this doesn't have the pioctl interface.
> i'm not sure what their intention is (all /proc stuff or some pioctl
> interface or what)
  .
  .
  .
> no rxkad implementation included. not shocking as implementing rxkad
> just by looking at other code is messy and there's no docs.


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			     kAFS: AFS FILESYSTEM
			     ====================

ABOUT
=====

This filesystem provides a fairly simple AFS filesystem driver. It is under
development and only provides very basic facilities. It does not yet support
the following AFS features:

	(*) Write support.
	(*) Communications security.
	(*) Local caching.
	(*) pioctl() system call.
	(*) Automatic mounting of embedded mountpoints.


USAGE
=====

When inserting the driver modules the root cell must be specified along with a
list of volume location server IP addresses:

	insmod rxrpc.o
	insmod kafs.o rootcell=cambridge.redhat.com:172.16.18.73:172.16.18.91

The first module is a driver for the RxRPC remote operation protocol, and the
second is the actual filesystem driver for the AFS filesystem.

Once the module has been loaded, more modules can be added by the following
procedure:

	echo add grand.central.org 18.7.14.88:128.2.191.224 >/proc/fs/afs/cells

Where the parameters to the "add" command are the name of a cell and a list of
volume location servers within that cell.

Filesystems can be mounted anywhere by commands similar to the following:

	mount -t afs "%cambridge.redhat.com:root.afs." /afs
	mount -t afs "#cambridge.redhat.com:root.cell." /afs/cambridge
	mount -t afs "#root.afs." /afs
	mount -t afs "#root.cell." /afs/cambridge

  NB: When using this on Linux 2.4, the mount command has to be different,
      since the filesystem doesn't have access to the device name argument:

	mount -t afs none /afs -ovol="#root.afs."

Where the initial character is either a hash or a percent symbol depending on
whether you definitely want a R/W volume (hash) or whether you'd prefer a R/O
volume, but are willing to use a R/W volume instead (percent).

The name of the volume can be suffixes with ".backup" or ".readonly" to
specify connection to only volumes of those types.

The name of the cell is optional, and if not given during a mount, then the
named volume will be looked up in the cell specified during insmod.

Additional cells can be added through /proc (see later section).


MOUNTPOINTS
===========

AFS has a concept of mountpoints. These are specially formatted symbolic links
(of the same form as the "device name" passed to mount). kAFS presents these
to the user as directories that have special properties:

  (*) They cannot be listed. Running a program like "ls" on them will incur an
      EREMOTE error (Object is remote).

  (*) Other objects can't be looked up inside of them. This also incurs an
      EREMOTE error.

  (*) They can be queried with the readlink() system call, which will return
      the name of the mountpoint to which they point. The "readlink" program
      will also work.

  (*) They can be mounted on (which symbolic links can't).


PROC FILESYSTEM
===============

The rxrpc module creates a number of files in various places in the /proc
filesystem:

  (*) Firstly, some information files are made available in a directory called
      "/proc/net/rxrpc/". These list the extant transport endpoint, peer,
      connection and call records.

  (*) Secondly, some control files are made available in a directory called
      "/proc/sys/rxrpc/". Currently, all these files can be used for is to
      turn on various levels of tracing.

The AFS modules creates a "/proc/fs/afs/" directory and populates it:

  (*) A "cells" file that lists cells currently known to the afs module.

  (*) A directory per cell that contains files that list volume location
      servers, volumes, and active servers known within that cell.


THE CELL DATABASE
=================

The filesystem maintains an internal database of all the cells it knows and
the IP addresses of the volume location servers for those cells. The cell to
which the computer belongs is added to the database when insmod is performed
by the "rootcell=" argument.

Further cells can be added by commands similar to the following:

	echo add CELLNAME VLADDR[:VLADDR][:VLADDR]... >/proc/fs/afs/cells
	echo add grand.central.org 18.7.14.88:128.2.191.224 >/proc/fs/afs/cells

No other cell database operations are available at this time.

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