writing another file system

[Naomaru Itoi]

Hello.  

My question may be rather strange, but this is the only e-mail group I 
can ask about this, so ... 

I am now writing another file system based on arla.  The file system
does not talk to AFS.  Instead, it talks to a smartcard.  

My basic idea is to replace arlad with my own daemon which handles
serial port connection with a smartcard.  I found out it is fairly
easy to plug my smartcard specific code into arla -- e.g. in
xfs_message_getroot(), xfs_message_getnode(), etc.

Now I would like to plug out arla's functionalities, such as disk
cache or credential handling.  But I am having a hard time doing it.
When I inactivate functions related with them in arlad, the kernel
hungs up because it sees invalid values or cannot access some area of
the message it gets from the daemon (arlad).

I think what I should do is to remove all functions dealing with cache
and credential in all code at once, but it requires me to understand
the whole code of arla, and it seems too much for me.

If you have any advice on it, any experience to share, or document you
refered when you wrote arla, it is very much welcomed.  

Thanks.

--
Concentration .. Naomaru Itoi