Has someone already used a NAS formated with a BFS volume as a POC ?
Is a BFS volume readeable/writeable from Windows, Linux, MacOS, ie are there any tools on these platforms for that ?
Linux can only read bfs. But if I’m not mistaken about how nas works, typically you access a nas sing nfs or some other networked filesystem, and so the underlying filesystem used for storage would not affect who can or can’t use the nas.
If you need a network filesystem with attributes and queries support, you would need to use Haiku’s netfs. As far as I know this then won’t be usable by any other OS.
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I actually have mostly BFS volumes attached to my NAS (running Ubuntu). Linux can only read access these volumes, and does not support reading files beyond 2G. I tried very hard to commit patches to fix the latter a couple of years ago, but the current Linux befs maintainer is completely unresponsive, and the maintainers of the higher levels are not much better.
Anyhow, read-only is not an acceptable solution, so the NAS is running Haiku in a VM that serves those disks via Samba. Haiku doesn’t run directly on the bare metal, as there were issues with the network driver over time. Not sure if that is still an issue, though. This setup works quite well.
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On occasions I have needed it I found the bfs fuse driver from the haiku source to work well enough in Linux (with write support).
I didn’t know we had samba server working in haiku, that’s cool!
It’s still Samba v3, though, so SMBv1 only, but apart from that, it works quite well.
What about porting netfs on linux to allow to run a netfs server in a Linux-based NAS, then?
Maybe some netfs constraints make this not a good idea.
IIRC netfs is 32 vs 64 bits sensible.
@stippi, any input on such idea?
Ingo originally wrote netfs, but what do you expect to gain from that?
If I would need to access the files from Haiku regularly, I would probably also set up netfs, but the data on the NAS is just a copy of the stuff in Haiku that I synchronize with some still unfinished software I wrote 15 years ago…
Well, I was expecting that Haiku already support it and that it could be easier to port on Linux to work above a well supported Read AND Write file system by Linux, including attributes, something we don’t have when using SMB or NFS.
Do we have a NFS client supporting NFS extended file attributes ?
Sorry for my confusion between Ingo and @Stippi …
iSCSI support would be pretty neat. Then you could creage a BeFS image and use it like a regular drive.
There’s a nbd (Network Block Device) driver already on Haiku, but I have no idea how functional it is, or how to properly set it up (in either client/server direction). There’s also a nbdkit recipe/package available on HaikuPorts too (again, no idea how functional it is).
If anyone has some experience with nbd, might be worth a blog post.
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Huh. I wouldn’t mind trying it out. I know how to use my NAS with iSCSI but don’t remember seeing nbd on there. I’ll poke around a bit.
There is also our own remote_disk_server used for network booting, but that could be used to mount a separate volume as well (with some work to package it and make it easy to run without going through jam)
@axeld Samba when running on Haiku sharing some folders on a BFS volume is supporting extended file attributes?
I don’t think so, and I don’t need it for my setup. If I would need to access it from Haiku, I’d also use netfs.
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There are 2 official Linux befs maintainers: Luis de Bethencourt and Salah Triki, but looking through the merged Linux befs patches from the last few years they never actually replied, reviewed or merged the patches: History for fs/befs - torvalds/linux · GitHub .
Instead, quite often it was Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org> who merged the proposed changes, and Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> who did a code review.
I’ve found your patches on lore.kernel.org where you tried to reach out to Luis and Salah and got no reply. Maybe it’s worth to give it another try but this time address Christian and Jan?
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Thanks @VoloDroid!
I haven’t bothered to look in the past years. I will try to find the motivation to give it another go. At least I should be able to find the time to do soon.
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