Question : Using libhandle from xfsprogs and xfs actions made "by handle"

DENIEL Philippe
2010-05-05T13:52:53Z

Hi,

I had a look at the stuff within xfsprogs and it really look pretty
nice. One thing is of great interest to me : the libhandle.so library.
I am currently developing a NFS server running in userspace (see
http://nfs-ganesha.sourceforge.net for details). As you know, the NFS
protocol has a "handle based" semantics in the way it manages FS
objects. All objects are identified by a unique filehandle or by their
name and the parent's directory filehandle. The trouble is that libC
does not include such "by handle" calls to manage FS, only the old
fashioned POSIX API which is a "By path" API.
When looking at XFS, I saw there was "open_by_handle" and
"path_to_handle" calls. This sounds very very good to me : this sounds
like kind of bridge to build a handle-based API to address XFS. But so
far, I am a bit stuck : for exporting XFS through my NFS server, I would
need to do "by handle" everything that can be done through POSIX calls,
open/read/write/close files, create files/directories/symlinks, erasing
or moving files... and so on. I do not know if this is possible with the
calls in libhandle.so. But if I had such handle based tools, I think I
could make a nice NFS server on top of XFS (I did this kind of port for
LUSTRE (which has a full handle based API) in my NFS server and I had
really good performances). Can someone provide me with information about
this ?

Regards

Philippe

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