So in my odissey between filesystems I had to do some serious kernel hacking to make sure I could get the HFS+ filesystem properly exported to my laptop. I actually have noticed iTunes failing often, to the point of annoyance, to copy the data, resulting in it to adapt automatically to a different path for the iTunes collection, but I didn’t understand the problem.
Turns out Christoph Hellwig knows the reason pretty well: my patch was incomplete, the get_parent() method is really needed for NFS to work properly, and he also provided me with a quick test case to try it out. Sure enough, there’s a problem. Unfortunately my first try, factoring out lookup() and use that to implement get_parent() like ext2/3 and other filesystems do, failed.
After looking around the code, and Apple’s specs, I start to understand: common UNIX-like filesystems always have an hardlink named .. for the parent directory, but HFS+ does not have that, instead you have to look up the “thread” catalog entries to know who’s the parent of a file or directory (or, as the specifications call it, folder).
Now, after having worked on this I feel like saying a couple of things: I really like Free Software because it makes it very nice to add support for something that didn’t exist before (like NFS export of HFS+), but I like the way Apple write complete specification for so many things. Maybe too specific, but still nice to have some rather than none.
This has been refreshing somewhat since I didn’t seriously hack at the kernel in years, since the time I dealt with porting LIRC to kernel 2.5, which happened, as you might guess, before 2.6 was released. Actually, during that period when I worked on the LIRC patchset, I also moved from Debian to Gentoo, which also was the main reason why I actually implemented devfs support for LIRC devices (hey you guys remember devfs, don’t you?).
Now, hopefully if I can find a bit more free time for this, I should be able to submit a couple more changes to the kernel which I’ve been scheduling for a while, and maybe I can try my Ruby-Elf scripts on the kernel itself. It would be great if they could help the kernel as much as they have helped me with xine and other projects.
At any rate, the future looks nicer tonight.