[OpenAFS] AFS from NFS Mount

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Brent Johnson wrote:

> So the only way I could run (theoretically) a fileserver over nfs is by
> using a namei fileserver?
>
> Also, any good info out there on what namei is and why we should use it?

It's not clear that "you should use it" (to me), but I suspect you mean
"what advantages does it have"... yes?

It just means that it's an all userspace daemon instead of needing to
lookup inodes directly via a kernel interface, and particularly that the file
names are significant.

There's some overhead because you're doing a lookup in the filesystem
instead of just opening the inode you want by number. How much this is has
been argued, and of course will vary from filesystem to filesystem anyhow.
But it means the fileserver is portable, because no longer do you need
kernel code, or need to worry that your filesystem (cough cough reiserfs)
doesn't bother to have unique inode numbers.