Anyone interested in helping with non-i386 Openafs?
Openafs is a distributed filesystem with authentication and good
administration features. It's quite mature and would be really neat
to be able to have for all Debian architectures. However, it has a
Kernel module and some arch-specific userspace code. The upstream
currently supports 2.2 and 2.4 on i386 and powerpc. This also works
in Debian.
I'd like to see it work on more Debian ports. This mostly means
dealing with upstream issues and porting; the Debian specific issues
should be minimal. People who help need to understand their arch's
instruction set and calling sequence as well as understand how to get
around in the Linux kernel.
Things I know need to be done for each new port:
* muck with lwp/process.c|s to indicate how context switches work.
This is part of a thread-like library that is used.
* Write arch-specific config files under config/param.*.
* Make any necessary changes to afs/Linux/*. For example for sparc64,
changes were needed to deal with 32-bit afs syscalls coming into the
system.
There are examples of patches used for s390, Sparc and Sparc64 in the
openafs-devel archives off of http://www.openafs.org. I'll work to
make sure that Debian supports any upstream Linux arch as the upstream
makes new releases. I'll also be happy to try and look at adding new
arches to Debian releases if someone sends me patches, although
obviously any such changes should also be sent upstream.
The Debian packages do currently work on Sparc, but apparently not on
Sparc64 with a 2.4 kernel, so that needs to be fixed.
So, if you think having a global network filesystem would be useful,
your help would be appreciated.
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