using arla-fuse on NetBSD

[Jonathan A. Kollasch]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 08:47:39PM +0100, Tomas Olsson wrote:
> Jonathan Kollasch writes:
> > I finally got arla-fuse from the 'HEAD' branch to run on NetBSD-5.
> > The trick is to not use the pthread LWP implementation.
> > 
> > I'm aware that arla-fuse is kinda new.  But, just as a data point,
> > it seems to be less smooth than nnpfs, particularly WRT playing
> > audio files out of AFS.
> >
> Neat! It was a quick hack, and I'm sure it can be improved. But
> it's nice to hear that it can be used. You didn't need to do any
> changes at all?

Aside from changing a -lfuse to -lrefuse, none.  And, of course,
skip building the parts that are broken, like nnpfs.
 
> Does it do any readahead?

I'm not sure, but after running a ktruss on arla-fuse, I found that
it was doing it's job somewhat inefficiently.

I observed that for every call to arla_read(), every cache-block file
that makes up the file is open(2)ed, read(2) and close(4)ed.  This
causes annoying pauses as mplayer requests more data (in batches of
2KiB chunks) from something the size of a typical 3-5 minute FLAC file.
Yet for a MP3, the process doesn't cause these pauses in playback.

So, there are some things to work out, but I've not dug into it
enough to really know what all needs improving and how.

Probably more fun to improve this than to port libafs
and glue that into fuse.  :-)

	Jonathan Kollasch