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| author | Alexander Bokovoy <ab@samba.org> | 2008-04-14 15:35:45 +0000 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Gerald W. Carter <jerry@samba.org> | 2008-04-23 08:47:45 -0500 |
| commit | 9c3c6106d72ecb384cc97ab3d8c1b5f5e9fe2df5 (patch) | |
| tree | 240cd0bddc972bb5833798fd4b040ca51e6043a7 | |
| parent | 87f7e0125502e2d2b55551883fb329582ccd05c8 (diff) | |
| download | samba-9c3c6106d72ecb384cc97ab3d8c1b5f5e9fe2df5.tar.gz samba-9c3c6106d72ecb384cc97ab3d8c1b5f5e9fe2df5.tar.bz2 samba-9c3c6106d72ecb384cc97ab3d8c1b5f5e9fe2df5.zip | |
Add small preface to a VFS guide. More to come.
(This used to be commit 9de9b5852c925a91e90651f28837a86ecd2e9e21)
| -rw-r--r-- | docs/Samba3-Developers-Guide/vfs.xml | 26 |
1 files changed, 26 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/docs/Samba3-Developers-Guide/vfs.xml b/docs/Samba3-Developers-Guide/vfs.xml index 25a45b6875..9005f5fd52 100644 --- a/docs/Samba3-Developers-Guide/vfs.xml +++ b/docs/Samba3-Developers-Guide/vfs.xml @@ -22,6 +22,32 @@ <sect1> <title>The Samba (Posix) VFS layer</title> +<para>While most of Samba deployments are done using POSIX-compatible operating systems, +there is clearly more to a file system than what is required by POSIX when it comes to +adopting semantics of NT file system. Since Samba 2.2 all file-system related operations +go through an abstraction layer for virtual file system (VFS) that is modelled after +both POSIX and additional functions needed to transform NTFS semantics. +</para> + +<para> +This abstraction layer now provides more features than a regular POSIX file system could +fill in. It is not required that all of them should be implemented by your +particular file system. However, when those features are available, Samba would advertize them to a +CIFS client and they might be used by an application and in case of Windows client that +might mean a client expects even more additional functionality when it encounters +those features. There is a practical reason to allow handling of this snowfall without modifying +the Samba core and it is fulfilled by providing an infrastructure to dynamically load +VFS modules at run time. +</para> + +<para>Each VFS module could implement a number of VFS operations. The way it does it is +irrelevant, only two things actually matter: whether specific implementation wants to cooperate +with other modules' implementations or not, and whether module needs to store additional +information that is specific to a context it is operating in. Multiple VFS modules could +be loaded at the same time and it is even possible to load several instances of the same +VFS module with different parameters. +</para> + <sect2> <title>The general interface</title> |