Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 16:27:30 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> Cc: Duncan Barclay <dmlb@dmlb.org>, Peter Pentchev <roam@orbitel.bg>, Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, fs@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: httpfs Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1010318162456.47896A-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <200103182051.f2IKp4g01900@earth.backplane.com>
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On Sun, 18 Mar 2001, Matt Dillon wrote: > You could certainly write a program to sit in the middle and cache > the request to handle that case. > > The problem with portalfs is that you can't 'cd' into it or do > directory operations on it, and filesystem operations such as lseek, > fstat, and so forth cannot be intercepted. It would be the ultimate > coolness if you could. > > We need a better solution then faking an NFS mount to be able to run > *real* filesystems in user space. > > But, that aside, portalfs works just dandy for getting simple file handles > from a path. Take a look at the XFS module included with Arla, and the Coda kernel module. They're both targetted at the idea that a userspace daemon will deal with open/close/directory requests, providing container vnodes for the actual files on demand, allowing the kernel to efficiently provide them to consumers. It's easy to imagine an HTTP backend daemon for them. The Arla kernel module is probably a bit more mature and better maintained; on the other hand, the Coda module is in our sys/ tree already. The OpenBSD folk have actually imported Arla into their distribution, which is actually not a bad idea now that OpenAFS is around... (Of course, we still need someone to port OpenAFS so that we have a free server -- with IFS on the server side, we should be able to exhibit a substantially simpler implementation with the same perform benefits as the AFS iopen() stuff :-) Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project robert@fledge.watson.org NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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