SupportedPlatforms

From Codawiki

Table of contents

Platform Support Status Table


Please update the platform table and notes according to your experience. Thanks!


Coda server Coda client (Venus) Coda client (Kernel module) Notes / Up-to-date information
GNU/Linux (general, building from source) Yes Yes Yes Fully-supported. Main development and test platform. Look for Coda software and kernel module in pub/coda/src (ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/src) @ Coda FTP.
Binary installer for any Linux distribution Yes for x86 Yes for x86, x86_64 included in most distros Available at http://www.aetey.se/index.php?Static&pg=CodaInstHowto
Debian GNU packages Yes for x86 Yes for x86 Yes for x86 Up to date packages repository is at http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/debian BRANCH/ , where BRANCH is stable, testing or unstable.
Fedora RPM packages Yes Yes In stock kernel Standard Fedora 13 repositories.
RHEL/CentOS RPM packages Yes Yes In stock kernel Add EPEL and Coda repositories. Then install using yum.
MacOS X Unknown Yes Yes for 10.3
No for 10.4
ULoCoda?
See DarwinCoda (http://www.opendarwin.org/projects/DarwinCoda/) old project page (no more functional?) and mailing list (http://coda.cs.cmu.edu/maillists/darwincoda/).
See platform-specific notes below.
NetBSD Yes Yes 6.0.1+ Full functionality, also accessible from Linux ABI
FreeBSD Unknown Yes FreeBSD 7.0 and greater, buggy See platform-specific notes below.
Sun Solaris Unknown Unknown Unknown There was Coda support for Solaris 7 (and 9?), old style - before realms
Microsoft Windows Unknown Yes for 2000/XP Yes for 2000/XP There is Windows status and download page (http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/windowsnt.html). Coda under Windows requires the Cygwin layer.

Platform-specific Notes

FreeBSD

Support for Coda on versions of FreeBSD < 7.0 is known to be unstable. In FreeBSD 7.0 and 8 the Coda client is believed to basically work, although has not been extensively tested. FreeBSD 9 has serious issues in its Coda kernel module which makes it currently unusable (shouldn't be hard to fix but remains unfixed despite bug reports to the kernel developers)

Mac OS X

To date, the only existing kernel module for coda died with 10.4. There were so many changes to the internal kernel interface that the job of porting became overwhelming. However, for 10.5 there is some light in the tunnel. Work has been done to create a userland only solution that does not require any kernel module. MacOS X allows for this because the two level linking scheme makes it possible to interpose most of the system calls. This approach may well be working for 10.4 also, but is yet untested.

General Portability Notes

Coda Server

The coda server does not require the kernel module nor it depends on a specific file system. That means the server should compile and run on any decent Unix platform that supports GNU autotools and compiler chain.

Coda Client / Venus

The Coda client cache manager, Venus, should compile and run on most platforms that supports GNU autotools and compiler chain. However, the nature of the Coda client is such that it requires kernel support, unless you are using ULoCoda (User Land only).

Coda Client / Kernel Support

Something has to catch accesses to the /coda filespace and handle bi-directional communication with cache manager Venus. This is the job of a kernel module, and the only big obstacle in getting the Coda client working under your operating system of choice is its kernel support for Coda. ULoCoda works around this limitation by letting a standard library intercept the accesses.

Due to operating system specifics, kernel modules can differ significantly in actual implementation and functionality. This should, however, mostly be transparent for the end users.