• Contact: tech-net
• Mentors: Matthias Scheler
• Duration estimate: 3 months

NetBSD currently uses The Berkeley Automounter Suite of Utilities for automatically mounting (network) file systems. This software package implements an automounter file system as a userland NFS daemon. While this generally works it has major drawbacks:

• File systems are not mounted directly on the desired mount point. As a result applications frequently use incorrect pathnames (e.g. /amd/server/home/user instead of /home/user) for automatically mounted directories or files beneath them. This is especially problematic in heterogeneous enviroments where not all machines use the same automounter.
• The automounter daemon cannot handle high I/O load very well, file access occasionally fails with intermittent errors.

The goal of this project is to implement a new automounter solution which addresses the above issues. This could either be done via a Solaris/Linux compatible autofs(4) full in-kernel file system or via a userland daemon using puffs.