Messages in this thread | | | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | Subject | Re: autofs: kernel-assisted automounter | Date | Mon, 7 Apr 1997 23:14:07 -0700 (PDT) |
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> MdI> What is the difference between autofs and amd? > > Also, how does autofs compare with the Solaris automounter? (The latter is > actually pretty nice, because it's invisible and is also coincidentally > called autofs.)
Hardly a coincidence; I stole ideas and naming conventions fairly liberally from Solaris, since in this particular case I think Sun did something fairly reasonable in Solaris. I *do* think the Solaris automounter is overfeatured, but that is another issue. The Linux automounter daemon will probably only support a subset of the Solaris features, unless some poor sucker actually writes a parser module for me -- I won't have that kind of time available (sorry).
(The next version of the autofs tools will have the lookup and parse/mount modules split; I plan to include a few more kinds of lookup maps.)
> I vaguely recall problems with kernel-level automounters in general really > messing things up on a hanging mount, and that multithreading within the > automounter was the answer. How does Linux autofs handle this?
I have no idea what you are talking about here. The only thing I can think about is if you try to do name lookups or mounts in the main loop of the automount daemon you will lose; however, my daemon forks a process to do any dirty (= potentially slow) work on a mount point, avoiding that problem. Using *kernel* threads would be significantly nicer, but I do not plan to use threads until kernel-based threading libraries are closer to universally available.
-hpa
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