Status of Linux KNFSD

Neil Brown (neilb@cse.unsw.edu.au)
Wed, 15 Dec 1999 10:17:09 +1100 (EST)


Greetings all.

Sorry about the long list of mail-lists, but questions about the
status of KNFSD have been asked in several different places -
including on linux-raid in the context of nfs+raid - lately, and now
that I feel I have an answer to give, I thought I would distribute it
widely.

I have been working on KNFSD (the Linux Kernel NFS daemon) for the
last few months and have been feeding patches to Linus for the 2.3
kernel series. These patches have come from various places including
H.J.Lu for VALinux, from SGI, and from my self.

At the release of 2.3.32 the nfs server has reached a state where I am
happy to leave it for a while. There is still work that can be done
(there always is) but I am happy that it is correct and reliable for
NFSv2.

I have back-ported all of the changes to Linux-2.2. and I have a patch
at

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/oss/knfsd/knfsd-2.3.32-2.2.13-patch.gz

which applies all of this functionality to 2.2.13

Some, but not all, of the improvements in this patch are in Alan Cox's
2.2.14-pre series. When 2.2.14 comes out, I may make a patch which
adds just the extras, but I wont do it until 2.2.14 becomes official.

My knfsd web page:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/oss/knfsd/

contains some extra comments about this release, including a TODO list
(so that I remember where I was up to if I ever get back to this).

The "feature-list" from that page is:

1.Assorted bugs fixed (e.g. you can now make named pipes and device
special files properly).
2.Re-write of the filehandle handling code so that inappropriate
ESTALE errors should be a thing of the past. There is a new
export option - no_subtree_check - which has a small but
sometimes significant effect on how filehandles are used. See the
man page for exports.
3.Experimental support for NFSv3 - no locking yet but the rest
seems to work.
4.New export option "nohide" just like SGI Irix. See the man page.
5.Selecting the "sync" export option now causes directory changes
as well as file changes to be written synchronously to disc.

You should use nfs-utils from
ftp://nfs.sourceforge.net/pub/nfs/nfs-utils-0.1.4.tar.gz
for exporting etc.

If you try this patch and have any problems, I am happy to hear about
them. Please Cc any such mail to "nfs@valinux.com".

Merry Christmas
NeilBrown
"Jesus is the Reason for the Season"

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