Re: [PATCH] AFS filesystem for Linux (2/2)

Linus Torvalds
2002-10-03T00:31:29Z

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, David Howells wrote:
>
> This patch adds an Andrew File System (AFS) driver to the kernel. Currently
> it only provides read-only, uncached, non-automounted and unsecured support.

Are you sure this is the right way to go?

As far as I can tell, this is a dead end, because we fundamentally cannot
do the local backing store from the kernel.

>From my (nonexistent) understanding of how AFS works, would it not be a
whole lot more sensible to implement it as a coda client or something like
that (with the networking support in-kernel, but with the caching logic
etc in user space).

I dunno, I just get the feeling that a good AFS client simply cannot be
done entirely in kernel space, and if you start off like this, you'll
never get where you really want to go. Pls comment on this (and yeah, the
comment can be a "Boy, you're really a stupid git, and here's why: xyz",
but I really want the "xyz" part too ;)

Now, admittedly maybe the user-space deamon approach is crap, and what we
really want is to have some way to cache network stuff on the disk
directly from the kernel, ie just implement a real mapping/page-indexed
cachefs that people could mount and use together with different network
filesystems.

Linus