[[!template id=project

title="Improved Automounter Support"

contact="""
[tech-kern](mailto:tech-net@NetBSD.org),
[tech-net](mailto:tech-net@NetBSD.org)
"""

mentors="""
"""

category="filesystems"
difficulty="medium"
duration="3 months"

description="""
NetBSD currently uses amd 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 milestones of this project are:

* implement a new automounter solution which has configurable mount points
* improve high I/O
* show benchmarks and implement automated tests

This could either be done via a Solaris/Linux compatible autofs(4) full in-kernel file system. FreeBSD has already implemented autofs, so we could port theirs and that should significantly simplify the project. 
"""
]]

[[!tag gsoc]]