bfs

Teldar's BeServed Open Sourced, Code Merged into Haiku Repository

News posted by koki on Sat, 2008-04-26 10:33
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As recently noted by Haiku developer Axel Dörfler on the development mailing list, Teldar Corporation has open sourced their BeServed network file sharing solution for BeOS and donated the code to Haiku. We are now pleased to announce that the donated code has been merged into the Haiku repository, and is available here. The package, donated to Haiku under the MIT license, contains user management and servers for several operating systems including, Microsoft Windows® and Linux®. While Haiku already has a native networking file system that has been in the works by Ingo Weinhold, the availability of the BeServed code will allow cross-pollination between the two code bases, eventually resulting in а powerful and solid native networking solution for Haiku.

Kevin Musick of Teldar Corporation had these words for us: "I am pleased to donate BeServed in its entirety to the Haiku project. After Be, Inc.'s demise, BeServed was no longer commercially viable and the pressures of my career and a young family forced me to pursue other opportunities. However, I am encouraged to see Haiku's progress and the ongoing commitment of the community. While I no longer have the bandwidth to participate in the project, I hope that BeServed will be useful in some small way. Congratulations on your progress and best wishes for continued success!"

BeServed is a network file system with support for attributes, MIME-based typing, indexing, and queries, all features available in the BFS file system as well as the open source version of BFS that Haiku uses. BeServed also features remote shared volume mounting as well as folder sharing management capabilities, giving the end user the ability to manage all their files with the powerful and unique advantages of the BFS file system over a LAN.

Thank you to Kevin for making this possible!

Haiku Getting UserlandFS, NetFS

News posted by umccullough on Tue, 2007-02-20 18:12
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We are excited to announce that Haiku developer Ingo Weinhold has recently committed UserlandFS to the repository. UserlandFS is designed to provide, for the first time in Haiku (and the BeOS platform), a stable and flexible environment for file system add-on development. Along with UserlandFS, Ingo has also committed several file system modules, including a Reiser FS 3.6 read-only implementation, a RAM FS (which is still work in progress), and NetFS, a Haiku-specific networking file system. NetFS is a native Haiku network file system that provides peer-to-peer networking capabilities for computers running Haiku on a LAN and includes full support for BFS attributes and live queries.

NetFS running in BeOS R5NetFS running in BeOS R5

In its current state, UserlandFS is coded to work in BeOS R5, but it will soon be ported to work with the new Haiku file system interface (which is slightly modified implementation from that of BeOS R5). It is hoped that the availability of UserlandFS will accelerate development of more file system add-ons for Haiku.

While a userland debugging "shell" for FS development already exists for Haiku, it has some limitations that can be avoided by using UserlandFS instead. The "FS shell" emulates the relevant part of the kernel (the complete VFS layer) and provides a CLI interface with several testing commands. UserlandFS instead offers the ability to use any application or test program with your FS directly — e.g. the Tracker — and results in the same access patterns you would expect with the file system running in the kernel.

According to Ingo, "the UserlandFS interface is identical to that of the kernel FS interface. Having the kernel interface as an option is particularly nice for developers who want to write a file system for the kernel. They can develop, test and debug in userland, and then just recompile for the kernel. Not only can a buggy FS running in userland not cause KDLs, but the debugging facilities available in userland are also way more comfortable (break/watch points, single stepping, etc.)".

NetFS is currently a working implementation already, and it provides all functionality that could be expected from a file system under Haiku with the use of attribute and live query support. Still missing is a preferences GUI to configure NetFS, so for now server side shares and user permissions are defined using a config file. The client is also capable of automatically locating other servers on the LAN.

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