AFS File-System Driver Overhauled For Linux 4.15

Red Hat developers have been working on an overhaul of the AFS file-system's kernel driver for the just-opened Linux 4.15 kernel merge window.

Not known as well as the other Linux file-systems, AFS is the Andrew File-System developed by Carnegie Mellon University and part of the mainline tree since the Linux 2.6 days. AFS is a distributed file-system along the likes of GFS, GlusterFS, Ceph, etc. It's not too often these days during Linux kernel merge windows that there is much talk of the Andrew File-System.

David Howells of Red Hat has been spearheading this several thousand lines of code rework to the AFS kernel code. These changes for Linux 4.15 add the preliminary work towards supporting network-namespacing, various network-related changes, more passive callback handling, improvements around file access permit caching, improved memory usage, overhauling of volume caching, and file server record caching has also been changed around. There's also been a overhaul of the data writeback handling and a range of other low-level code changes. This work does end up removing support for pre-3.4 AFS servers, which were introduced in the late 90's.

AFS users can find more about all of these major changes via this pull request.