Microsoft DFS and the CIFS VFS

[David W. Chapman Jr.]

On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 03:05:31PM -0500, Steven French wrote:
> >From: jra at samba.org (Jeremy Allison)
> 
> >On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 06:06:52AM +0930, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> >>
> >> Has it been checked on FreeBSD? If not, if you give me the source, I
> will
> > check it for you.
> 
> >It is GPL code. I don't think it can be used in the FreeBSD kernel
> >(correct me if I'm wrong Steve).
> >
> >Jeremy.
> 
> I am not quite complete on the DFS support in the CIFS VFS but expect to
> finish that soon.   I am debugging two more important problems at the
> moment a) not killing a captive thread on unmount, and b) (which is turning
> out to be harder) a problem displaying info on symbolic links created the
> Microsoft way ie with Microsoft "reparse points"
> 
> There are still some big holes in it - not all of the code is endian
> neutral and it does not do locking yet although it does do some neat things
> like hardlinks to Windows servers.
> 
> On the second question - the license, I am glad that David et al brought
> this up.   I had wanted to allow the code (at worts the main smb PDU
> definitions and flags in the main headers) to be able to be reused in user
> space utilities and on other platforms but on Linux most kernel code is
> licensed as GPL (devfs is an exception and is LGPL).     Currently the code
> that I wrote myself (the majority) is licensed LGPL.   But there are some
> header files (for error mapping)  from Samba which are GPL and three or
> four encryption routines that came from Samba that cause a few C files to
> be GPL.

I talked to a few FreeBSD developers and I don't think this will be too much 
of a problem.  They pointed me towards the GPL math emulator that can 
be compiled into the kernel and compiles with FreeBSD.  When you are 
finished I will have them review this again to make sure having GPL 
in the kernel isn't a problem.  If we can make this a kernel loadable 
module on FreeBSD, I don't see any problem at all though.
 
-- 
David W. Chapman Jr.
dwcjr at inethouston.net	Raintree Network Services, Inc. <www.inethouston.net>
dwcjr at freebsd.org	FreeBSD Committer <www.FreeBSD.org>