Firefox & GNOME Can Finally Run On The AFS File-System With Linux 5.2

AFS, the Andrew File-System that serves as a distributed file-system and used by the likes of Carnegie Mellon University and has seen ports to different operating systems, can now handle more programs running on top of the file-system like Firefox and GNOME.

The AFS file-locking up until now has caused issues with SQLite databases as is commonly used by Firefox and countless other desktop applications on multiple platforms. With the Linux 5.2 kernel changes, AFS file-locking changes now jive with SQLite and thus allow a lot more applications to run when AFS is in use as the home directory.

These AFS changes were previously proposed for Linux 5.1 but ended up being rejected as "untested new crap" by Linus Torvalds. Now the code is cleaned up and has been pulled by Torvalds into mainline.

This implementation needed to emulate fine-grained locking and the behavior can be toggled as a mount parameter. Other AFS changes for Linux 5.2 include extra logging, silly rename for unlock() and rename(), fixing xattr handlers, and other fixes.

More details on the Andrew File-System changes via this pull request.