AFS and Fedora and the 2.6 kernel

[Pete Zaitcev]

On Thu, 15 Apr 2004 10:48:31 -0400
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org> wrote:

> We're heavy AFS users here at Boston University, and it's going to be a
> major blow to not have an AFS client available. OpenAFS, last I looked, said
> that it'd take them a year to properly develop a 2.6 version *if* they got
> some funding to do so -- and they don't. Arla doesn't seem to be going
> anywhere.

This is a fair assessement of the status, sans the "funding" whines.
It's not as if anyone else is rolling in money.

> So that leaves the in-kernel AFS -- which was apparently developed by
> someone at Red Hat. (An enterprise customer needed it, perhaps?)

The "someone"'s name is clearly present in the source, I believe,
and that is of David Howells. I and dwmw2 dabbed in it as well.

That client (kAFS) is not useful for any real work and I do not
see it becoming one before well into 2.7.

> Can someone point me to further information, or nicely tell me about, Red
> Hat / Fedora's plans in this regard? And what I can do to help? (From a
> tester's perspective at the very least.)

Feature requests come in, but David does have other responsibilites.
I try to do things about it in the community capacity, but it is not
going much of anywhere.

I think it would be the best if you found some grad students to
hack on AFS, either OpenAFS or kAFS. Both projects are amendable
to patches, in my experience, they just have no hacking cycles
to them. It's not important which one you decide to advance,
as long as you do.

If you cannot do that, well, that's tough. To stick to RHEL 3 and
OpenAFS would probably your best bet.

-- Pete