Porting the Coda File System to Windows
Peter J. Braam, Michael J. Callahan, M. Satyanarayanan, Marc Schnieder
Abstract
We first describe how the Coda distributed filesystem was ported to Windows
95 and 98. Coda consists of user level cache managers and servers and kernel
level code for filesystem support. Severe reentrancy difficulties in the
Win32 environment on this platform were overcome by extending the DJGPP
DOS C compiler package with kernel level support for sockets and more flexible
memory management. With this support library and kernel modules for Windows
9x filesystems in place, the Coda file system client could be ported with
very little patching and will likely soon run as well on Windows 9x as
on Linux. We ported Coda file servers to Windows NT. For fileservers the
Cygwin32 kit was used. We will not report here on the port of the Coda
client to Windows NT, which is in an early stage. In both cases cross compilation
from a Linux environment was most helpful to get a good development environment.