[OpenAFS] oAFS & Arla

[Jimmy Engelbrecht]

Mike Fedyk <mfedyk@matchmail.com> writes:

> Why doesn't OpenAFS merge with Arla?

Both products have big benefits.

- Arla has no fileserver that you could use in production.
- Arla has no support for most commercial UNIX variants.
- Arla has still incomplete fs, vos, commands. (you can just use the OAFS stuff)
- Arla is easyer to port to new plattforms.
- Arla has some cool stuff like fs getstatistics that you will never see in
  openafs.
- Arla has a cool adaptive mechanism that decides which replica to use.


- OpenAFS has a very stable and working fileserver environment.
- OpenAFS has all the AFS-tools. (fs,vos,bos)
- The OpenAFS client is completly written in the kernel, which is not only
  scary but also hard to port to new plattforms, it also limits the ammount
  of coll features you want to implement.
- OpenAFS is ported to far more plattforms.
- The OpenAFS people do a lot of binray releases.

I work on both projects. I see no benefits with a merge at this time.

> It is said arla has a stable client, and 2.6 support without syscall
> table hacks.

What you mean is that you dont need to patch your kernel when you run arla
on current 2.6 kernels. There is still an ugly hack inside the arlacode to
hook the syscalltable, so that you dont need to care where your OS-vendor
is hiding the syscalltable this week.

But we try to find another sollution.

> Are the BSD and IPL licenses compatible?

We can in most cases, and we copy some code from each other.

>  That way, you could pick and
> choose the parts from arla you want,

well, thats what most people do.

> and split on file boundaries.

what do you mean ?

>  If
> not then BSD (without the advertising clause) is supposedly compatible
> with just about anything.  So could it be "transformed" into IPL
> licensed code?

Thats how i interpret it, but i am not a lawyer and dont care that much
either.

> How production ready is their client (especially the Linux kernel module)?

Linux and the BSD's is fine.

On MacOS X there are some issues but it might be better than the current
OAFS'stuff anyways, but i am not sure, we are experimenting with both at
the current time.

/Jimmy