[uClibc]Alternative network filesystems

Jason Bodnar jason at shakabuku.org
Wed Feb 13 23:27:04 UTC 2002


Since NFS mounting with busybox seems to be a bit spotty (or it just may be a
problem on my end) and it doesn't seem like smbmount will ever build against
uClibc due to it's bloat (smbmount not uClibc) I've started looking at a
couple of alternative network filesystems:

InterMezzo (http://www.inter-mezo.org)

InterMezzo was just recently added to the Linux kernel and looks pretty neat.
At the moment though it doesn't look like a drop network filesystem for an
embedded system. Currently, InterMezzo replicates the entire remote
filesystem. Obviously, this is bad news for embedded systems with limited RAM.
The web site says fetch on demand will be in future versions. The other
limitation concerning embedded systems that I see is that InterMezzo uses a
user level file server and cache manager that runs on both the server and
client and is written in Perl. Perl is the problem but I would think it could
be rewritten in C and linked against uClibc.

Coda (http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/)

The Linux kernel has support for Coda but it also needs a cache manager on the
client side. The cache manager, Venus, is written in C++. I'm guessing that
means it can't be built against uClibc?

FTP File System (http://ftpfs.sourceforge.net/)

Yes, Virginia, you can use FTP as a networked file system. A kernel module is
available and that is all that's required on the client side. The author
emphasizes you should have decent bandwidth between the client and server and
recommends that only one process accesses the filesystem at a time. (Sounds
like it could use a cache manager.) Other than the limitations, FTPfs should
work out of the box on an embedded system with uClibc.


Does anybody have any other suggestions?

Also, I noticed a few people asked about using Samba with uClibc/Busybox. I'm
broke and unemployed at the moment but would be willing to chip in a few bucks
to sponsor development of an uClibc-friendly smbmount. Perhaps there are some
companies out there that could use it as well and may have deeper pockets than
me ;-)

Jason Bodnar



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