Coda Distributed File System, version 5.0.0

Coda is a distributed file system like NFS and AFS.  It is freely
available under the GPL.  It functions somewhat like AFS in being a
"stateful" file system.  Coda and AFS cache files on your local
machine to improve performance.  But Coda goes a step further than AFS
by letting you access the cached files when there is no available
network, viz. disconnected laptops and network outages.  Coda also has
read write replication servers.  The Coda file server is outside the
kernel and on the client theCoda cache manager Venus is again outside
of the kernel, but on clients one needs a kernel module.

To get more information on Coda, check out

        http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu

There is a wealth of documents, papers, and theses there.  There is
also a good introduction to the Coda File System in

        http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ljpaper/lj.html

and a Coda-HOWTO:

        http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/coda-howto.html

Coda was originally developed as an academic prototype/testbed.  It is
being polished and rewritten where necessary.  Coda is a work in
progress and does have bugs.  It is, though, very usable.  Our
interest is in making Coda available to as many people as possible and
to have Coda evolve and flourish.

The bulk of the Coda file system code supports the Coda client
program, the Coda server program and the utilities needed by both.
All these programs are unix programs and can run equally well on any
Unix platform.  Our main development thrust is improving these
programs.  There is a small part of Coda that deals with the kernel to
file system interface.  This code is OS specific (but should not be
platform specific).

Coda is currently available for several OS's and platforms:

        linux 2.0: i386 & sparc
        linux 2.1: i386 & sparc
        Freebsd-2.2.5: i386
        Freebsd-2.2.6: i386
	Freebsd -current: i386
        NetBSD 1.3: i386
	NetBSD -current: i386

New in this release are alpha releases for:

        Windows 95 -- Coda client
        Windows NT -- Coda server

The relevant sources, binaries, and docs can be found in

        ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/

There are several mailing lists @coda.cs.cmu.edu that discuss coda:
coda-announce and linux-coda.  We are going to revise linux-coda to be
OS neutral, since it is mainly Coda we want to discuss.  We appreciate
comments, feedback, bug reports, bug fixes, enhancements, etc.

Changes since our previous release have been very extensive.  The
ChangeLog lists them in more detail but the most important ones are:

 - a totally new directory system throughout the clients and servers
   (this eliminates some of the nastiest bugs Coda had, but there might
    be some bugs left in the new code).
 - very much improved handling of weak connectivity on the client and 
   disconnected operation.  (Peter now takes his email home in Coda
   and comes back the next morning to reintegrate.)	 
 - fixed many annoyances with losing connections.
 - fixed a few nasty deadlocks in the transaction handling
 - fixed several buffer overflow problems

Coda remains an experimental system, but in comparison with 4.6.6 our
last major release, the usability has improved very much.  Please let
us know about problems, since we will try to fix them right away.

Compatibility with previous versions:
 
 - network protocol: can coexists with 4.6.7 and later
 - disk format client: can only coexists with 5.0pre1
 - disk format for server: backward compatible


The Coda Team
-------------

Peter Braam
Bob Baron
Jan Harkes
Marc Schnieder

coda_at_cs.cmu.edu