[OpenAFS] AFS in linux kernel 2.6

[Ryan Underwood]

Hi,

On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 05:41:09PM +0100, Vladimir Nadvornik wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> What is the status of AFS support in linux kernel 2.6?
> I tried the AFS client included in the kernel, but it seems to be far from 
> complete.
> Is anybody working on porting OpenAFS to 2.6?

This has been brought up before.  I think there are 3 problems:

1) OpenAFS doesn't work reliably with preemptible kernel.  This support
was merged in 2.6, though I believe it can be disabled.

2) A reusable method for handling PAGs needed to be devised to reduce
the number of kludges the OpenAFS kernel module needs to do to handle
tokens

3) Modules are no longer allowed to access the sys_call_table to hook
system calls.  This makes it difficult for the OpenAFS kernel module to
work as it has in the past.

So far nobody has stepped up to work on the issues.  That will most
likely change once a stable 2.6.0 kernel is released and we start seeing
significant adoption of it.

You are correct that the AFS module included with the kernel is a joke.
The only real use I can see for it is for remote mounts of /usr, for
diskless booting or centralized software management.  I hope that the
idea is to introduce tokens with the in-kernel crypto API.  Otherwise,
it is mostly useless for real AFS sites.

-- 
Ryan Underwood, <nemesis@icequake.net>