Hi, We are investigating the feasibility of providing some sort of file system like frontend to a large data-base environment. It seems to be very difficult to get documentation/information on how to go about doing this. I know about the Virtual Filesystem Interface (VFS) that most modern kernels use, but I have no documentation on it. Also the degree of vendor support for kernel access at this level is unclear. One approach we are considering is to write our own modified NFS daemon which would provide the NFS/RPC services over a different port than what the regular NFS daemon uses. Instead of reading the structure of a remote file system, the data base would supply the information. This method is relatively straightforward to implement and does not require any kernel changes. A major concern with this approach is the performance of such a system. Another approach would be to actually provide a simple native file system which could provide all the services we need at a direct level. The reason I am posting here is that AFS is a third party file system that runs on various platforms with out the various kernels actually knowing about it. Information on how AFS manages to dynamically kernel load its own VFS extensions would be very useful. One possibility we have considered is getting the AFS source code and learning/hooking into the mechanisms it uses. The idea would be to strip it down to just provide the type of access we need. Is this feasible? Are there any source examples that already exist that do something similar? What restrictions/copyright issues are there with respect to AFS source? Any references, books, experiences etc. on this would be gratefully appreciated! -- Guenther Kramer Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada. Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] #include <std.disclaimer.h>
