OpenAFS is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

implementation of the

Andrew Andrew is the English form of a given name common in many countries. In the 1990s, it was among the top ten most popular names given to boys in List of countries where English is an official language, English-speaking countries. "Andrew" is freq ...

distributed file system A clustered file system is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system (only direct attached storage for ...

(AFS). AFS was originally developed at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

, and developed as a commercial product by the

Transarc Transarc Corporation was a private Pittsburgh-based software company founded in 1989 by Jeffrey Eppinger, Michael L. Kazar, Alfred Spector, and Dean Thompson of Carnegie Mellon University. Transarc commercialized the Andrew File System (AFS), n ...

Corporation, which was subsequently acquired by IBM. At ''LinuxWorld'' on 15 August 2000, IBM announcedos-afs
archived their plans to release a version of their commercial AFS product under the

IBM Public License The IBM Public License (IPL) is a free open-source software license written and occasionally used by IBM. It is approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and described as an "open-source license" by the Open Source Initiative. The IPL dif ...

. This became OpenAFS. Today, OpenAFS is actively developed for a wide range of operating system families including:

AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *An Alternate Index, for a Virtual Storage Access Method Key Sequenced Data Set * Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belgi ...

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

, Darwin,

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on Unix System V (initially System III) and first released in 1984. Current versions support HPE Integrity Ser ...

Irix IRIX ( ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the XFS file system and ...

Solaris Solaris may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is a ...

Foundation

Th
OpenAFS Foundation
was established on May 20, 2013 as a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering the stability and growth of OpenAFS.

Governance

Governance of the project is split between the board of elders who consider issues of strategic direction, and the gatekeepers who control the source repository.

Licensing

Although there is no legal entity that owns the OpenAFS source code, copyright on many files is attributed to IBM. Most of the source is covered by the IPL, however several files in the tree are covered by university vanity licenses. All applicable licenses are listed in a file in the source repository calle
openafs/doc/LICENSE

Development

Th

over the last five years have mad

to both the implementation and the AFS3 protocol without breaking interoperability with the IBM/Transarc releases. Since that announcement was written, several large development projects have been integrated, such as: 64-bit MS-Windows support, MS-Windows 7 support, Apple-Mac OS X v10.4-v10.9 support, and th
demand attach fileserver
Many development projects are at various stages of completion. The following are several prominent examples: * Fileserver backend utilizing object storage
rxtcp

rxgk
* rxk5
Instrumentation framework

Byte-range locking support

Deployment

The existing user base includes small single server cells as well as large multinational deployments spanning academia, private research laboratories, government, and commercial entities. A small snapshot of the deployed AFS cells can be found by reviewing the contents of th
CellServDB
file distributed with OpenAFS.

References

External links

OpenAFS websiteAFS Wiki
{{IBM FOSS Network file systems Free network-related software IBM software File systems supported by the Linux kernel