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character device (/dev/hpssfs0) that is used to communicate with the HPSS VFS Daemon
(hpssfsd). All POSIX I/O system calls like open, read, write, close, etc. are first handled by the
VFS abstraction layer after which they are passed down to appropriate functions in the Kernel
Module. The Kernel Module translates the POSIX I/O requests into HPSS requests and then
forwards these requests (via /dev/hpssfs0) to the HPSS VFS Daemon (hpssfsd), which in turn
sends requests to the Core Server.
• HPSS VFS Device Special File (/dev/hpssfs0) – This character device special file corresponds to
a Linux character device and provides the means for sending HPSS requests and receiving HPSS
replies between the Kernel Module and the HPSS VFS Daemon.
• HPSS VFS Daemons (hpssfsd) – The daemon is linked against the HPSS Client API library. It
translates Kernel Module requests to Client API library calls and converts Client API library call
responses back into Kernel Module replies. Instances of the HPSS VFS Daemon are started for
every Linux file system mount.
• HPSS VFS Mount Helper (mount.hpssfs) – The mount helper is spawned by the mount command.
• The Mount Helper calls the mount system call which in turn drills down to the Kernel Module to
do kernel mount processing. The mount helper also spawns one or more HPSS VFS Daemons.
The installation and configuration process populates the system with the above components.
14.3.2. Supported Linux Versions
The VFS Interface is currently only supported on Linux platforms for the Intel x86 and Power PC with
the following kernel version:
• 2.6.18-164.EL5smp (RHEL 5.4 on Intel x86 64-bit and Power PC)
Use the "uname -a" command to determine the kernel version and architecture of the client machine. It is
necessary to modify the client machine's operating system to match the above prerequisites since the
operating system level must match the environment in which the VFS Interface rpm packages were
generated.
14.3.3. Installation and Configuration of VFS
14.3.3.1. Extracting from HPSS Source Tree
In additional to the VFS specific code, the HPSS client API is a pre-requisite for installing VFS on a
client machine. For that reason, the extraction process includes both the ‘fs’ (VFS specific code) and
‘clnt’ (HPSS Client API) packages.
On the HPSS Core Server machine as ‘root’:
% mkdir /tmp/vfs_client
% cd /opt/hpss
HPSS Management Guide November 2009
Release 7.3 (Revision 1.0) 346