9. Arla timeline

Arla have existed for quite some years.

Development started around XXX by Björn Grönvall bg@nada.kth.se, quick followers was Assar assar@sics.se (at that time assar@pdc.kth.se>) and Johan Danielsson <joda@pdc.kth.se. The platform that was chosen was Sparc SunOS4 (the OS that NADA, KTH was using).

Some work was being done by Patrik Stymne patriks@e.kth.se in porting arla to Ultrix, but this work was never finished.

At this time there was no free rx, lwp or rxkad. A basic rx implementation was written, and the threading problem was solved by using pthreads.

The Arla development started to slow down around 11 April 1995.

In about Mar-Jun 1996 rx and lwp was released by Transarc, this was made possible by Jim Doyle jrd@bu.edu, and Derrick J. Brashear shadow@dementia.org.

In September 1997, an rxkad implementation was written by Björn. At the same time, a need for an AFS client for OpenBSD rose at the Stacken, the local computer club at KTH. Other free OS:es, as NetBSD, FreeBSD and Linux(primarily sparc) were also in need of AFS clients.

In TokKOM, a local communications system using LysKOM (http://www.lysator.liu.se/lyskom/), Assar suggested to some club members that it would be a nice thing to resume the arla development.

Some people suggested that it would be less trouble having someone with access to the Transarc AFS source code port the code to the relevent platforms. Assar then ported xfs to FreeBSD 2.2.x in notime (over the night), just to show the high portability.

People started to understand that arla was a concept that would work, and first out was Love Hörnqvist-Åstrand lha@stacken.kth.se to join. Development was primarily aimed at OpenBSD and NetBSD at the moment, and Arla lived for at least 2-3 weeks in /var/tmp on a host named yakko.stacken.kth.se.

Magnus Ahltorp map@stacken.kth.se joined shortly thereafter, spending the rest of the year reading about the Linux VFS, and after a while, Artur Grabowski art@stacken.kth.se also started to work on arla, concentrating on OpenBSD kernel stuff.

The first entry in ChangeLog is dated Fri Oct 24 17:20:40 1997. Around this time arla was given a CVS tree, to ease development. Now you could also mount the xfs-device and get the root-directory out of it.

The Linux port was done in a few weeks in the beginning of 1998. Only the Linux 2.0 kernel was supported at this time.

In April 1998 Assar hade a Arla paper presented at Freenix. Linux 2.1 support was written also written around this time. This was a major work since there was a lot of stuff that had changed (namely the dcache).

The first milko entry is dated Thu Oct 30 01:46:51 1997. Note that this milko in a sense "worked". You could get files out from it and store them.

There was from this point a lot of work being done and quite a lot of studies was "wasted". We learned a lot, but not the stuff we were expected to.

We added support for `dynroot' and `fake-mp' to prepare for Windows and Darwin/MacOSX support.

In Mars 2000 preliminary support for MacOS X/Darwin 1.0 was merged in by Magnus and Assar.

Around the same time there we hacked in support for Solaris 8 (beta2) There was also some work being done on Windows 2000 native driver at same time.

In June 2000 there was a presentation on MADE2000 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

In September 2000 MacOS X Beta was working.

This just includes some milestones, for more information se Changelog.* and NEWS files in the distribution.