[OpenAFS] OpenAFS on Linux 2.5.x

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, Jon Bendtsen wrote:

> >>It's going to fail regardless, until someone ports the kernel module
> >>to 2.5.  The kernel interfaces have changed significantly since 2.4
> >>(as has the kernel-module build system!).  It will be a good couple
> >>man-weeks, I suspect, to port the code to 2.5.
> >
> >
> > Not really, but I don't think it's worth bothering unless the kernel
> > people have decided to stop treating us like a third world country.
>
> hmm, this sounds a little arrogant. Why is it you feel that they
> treat you bad? And what have you done to make them do that ?

I guess that would be
-essentially precluded us from continuing to provide the functionality we
do now (because sys_call_table has become private, we must not hook the
setgroups/getgroups system calls for doing PAG management. that's not
really unreasonable. however, some bit of per-process state needs to exist
and be propagated across fork. the only obvious other thing in the task
structure was being eaten by people who hated that the other patch which
had been incorporated at the time touched so much of the code. basically
that code was intended to allow a lot of hooks into the kernel for
security auditing, and apparently a large number of people felt hooks were
unclean. the hook we would have used would have allowed us to create an
object and chain it into a pointer off a task struct, then cause it to be
copied on a fork. the big deal here is 2.5 was supposed to be
feature-frozen essentially immediately after this, so basically the net
effect from where i'm sitting is "you can't have what you need to enable
you to keep working".

and
-i don't think they treat me, particularly, as a second-class citizen, but
instead, that afs gets that treatment. i think i elaborated on that a bit
already in a previous message. if not, and if no one else has, and if you
think it matters, i can explain that.

basically, what you chalk up to potential arrogance, or perhaps to
arrogance regardless, i can explain as this:
-many parts of afs use the afs system call. currently there is no way for
these to work in linux 2.5 and beyond. by and large these can be
rewritten.
-in order for PAGs to continue to work, we need some way to track process
creation and parenting. without that, it's not worth my time, personally,
to work on the client, because i need PAGs. i can't speak for anyone else,
because i have no employees who i get to speak for;-)