[[!template id=project

title="New automounter"

contact="""
[tech-kern](mailto:tech-kern@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.
* Userland NFS daemons are prone to deadlocking.

The milestones of this project are:

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

There are at least two possible approaches: one is to port FreeBSD's
autofs(4), which is an in-kernel file system. This has the advantage
of already existing, and being at least loosely Linux and Solaris
compatible. (One could also write a new autofs but that doesn't seem
like a dominant strategy.)

Another possible approach is a new userland daemon using puffs.
"""
]]

[[!tag gsoc]]