Re: [9fans] 9P or better file services for multiple platforms

["Brian L. Stuart" <blstuart@bellsouth.net>]

On Sat, 9/1/18, Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to arrive at the most elegant solution to the following
> problem that does not sacrifice a great deal of efficiency. And, maybe
> I need to state this, the final result must be as robust or more
> robust than what I have in place currently, which has yet to let me
>
> My system mixes up Plan 9 and Linux platforms, none of them
>
> My hope is to provide a central file server that fulfills reliable
> file services to both Plan 9 and Linux as seamlessly as possible. I am

I'm not going to make any guarantees about the reliability,
but I do have a file system running on Plan 9, that natively
provides NFS service as well as 9P.  I also run it with a
snapshot device under it and get the type of history we
expect in a Plan 9 world.  To make the *nix side happy,
it does support symbolic links.  (Reading a symlink in Plan 9
just results in the path name string that the link points to.)
And to make things really fun, it also serves AOE.

I've been running it now on my home system for several
years.  I honestly don't use the NFS capability all that often,
but I did test it a fair amount back at Coraid.  Recently, I
added a little feature to the snapshot device to allow me
to easily migrate to a larger disk.  As a matter of fact, I read
your e-mail in acme on a 9vx which was taking its root from
this file system.

I'm sure there are plenty of nits that people could pick with
it and the details of its design, but it was an interesting
approach to experiment with and it's been serving me
well for about 4 or 5 years.  The file system itself runs in
user space on vanilla Plan 9, and the snapshot device
can be added to the kernel very easily.

Although there is a version of both the snapshot device
and the file system on contrib, if anyone's interested, I
can get you the most recent code to play with.

BLS