Re: MPSAFE VFS -- List of upcoming actions

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 6:45 PM, Attilio Rao <attilio_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> 2012/7/18, Gustau Pérez i Querol <gperez_at_entel.upc.edu>:
>>
>>     Sorry fo the delay.
>>
>>     About the ntfs support, I'd go with fuse and leave the most relevant
>> filesystems in kernel space. In fact filesystems not particulary
>> specific and not tied our kernel would go to userspace; thinks like
>> smbfs, nwfs, ntfs, ext2 o ext4 for example should be in userspace (the
>> list is incomplete and I don't really know if all of them are yet
>> implemenent in userspace) in my opinion. That would make them easier to
>> maintain (changes in the kernel would only affect fuse, once fixed all
>> the userspace filesystem would work again).
>>
>>     As a bonus, we would get many working fs based on fuse. In the
>> server side gluster is a desirable thing; in the desktop things like
>> gvfs (in the linux world gvfs is used not only by gnome but also by kde
>> or xfce) or truecrypt
>
> I'm really concerned also about ntfs and smbfs at the moment. It seems
> that there is also a FUSE smbfs port, but I never used it and I'm not
> sure about its state at all.

>From what I understand, Apple have done a considerable amount of work
on the FreeBSD-drived smbfs in the latest versions of OS X, based on
the existing smbfs in tree:

    http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/smb/smb-552.5/

I imagine things like the filesystem locking are probably somewhat
different, but in terms of updating smbfs itself to support newer
features it may be a good base (licensing permitting). smbfs at the
moment lacks in some areas such as DFS support, although I do not know
if the OS X version is any different there (given the consumer focus
of their OS, probably not). There was also a version spun off by
OpenSolaris:

    http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+smbfs/

which again was based on the FreeBSD + Apple versions.

I also have a vested interest in NWFS continuing to work - only from a
legacy point of view where we still interoperate with a number of
Netware 6 servers through this. While those will likely eventually go
away, more than likely before we move to 10.x, if there is anyone
capable of working on it we could supply a test environment.
Unfortunately the actual locking of the NWFS and NCP modules is
outside my sphere of knowledge...

-- Antony