Hi all, It's time for a release, autofs-5.1.6. This is an important release because it marks the beginning of work to be done torward resolving the very long standing problem of using very large direct mount maps in autofs, along with the needed mitigatigation of the effects of those large mount tables in user space. The first thing that needs to be done is for autofs to get back to what is was before the symlinking of the mount table to the proc file system. From experience having a large number of (largely not useful) autofs mount entries showing up in the mount table makes system administation frustrating and is quite annoying. To do this I'm using the same approach used in other SysV autofs implementations of providing an autofs pseudo mount option "ignore" that can be used by user space as a hint to ignore these mount entries. This will require fairly straight forward changes to glibc and libmount at least. The glibc change has been accepted and I plan on submitting a change for libmount when I get a chance. A configuration option, use_ignore_mount_option, has been added to autofs that is initially disabled to allow people to enable it when they are confident that there won't be unexpected problems. The side effects of very large mount tables in user space is somewhat difficult to mitigate. First, to acheive this autofs needs to not use the system mount table for expiration "at all". Not using the mount table for expires has proven very difficult to do and initial attempts resulted in changes that didn't fit in well at all. The changes to clean up the mount table listing amounted to making autofs use it's own genmntent(3) implementation (borrowed from glibc) but quite a bit of that change was re-factoring toward eliminating the need to use the mount table during expires. I had trouble getting that to work, let alone stable, but the approach will fit in well with the current design so it's progress. Then there's the affect of very large mount tables on other user space applications. For example, under rapid mount activity we see several user space process, systemd, udisk2, et. al., growing to consume all available CPU and a couple of others performing poorly simply because the mount table is large. I had planned on using the fsinfo() system call being proposed by David Howells for initial mount handing improvements in libmount, and later David's related kernel notifications proposal for further libmount mount table handling improvements but those propsals have seen some challenges being accepted so we will have to wait and see how things go before working out how to acheive this rather difficult goal. So there's a long way to go but progress is bieng made! Additionally there are a number of bug fixes and other minor improvements. autofs ====== The package can be found at: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/daemons/autofs/v5/ It is autofs-5.1.6.tar.[gz|xz] No source rpm is there as it can be produced by using: rpmbuild -ts autofs-5.1.6.tar.gz and the binary rpm by using: rpmbuild -tb autofs-5.1.6.tar.gz Here are the entries from the CHANGELOG which outline the updates: 07/10/2019 autofs-5.1.6 - support strictexpire mount option. - fix hesiod string check in master_parse(). - add NULL check for get_addr_string() return. - use malloc(3) in spawn.c. - add mount_verbose configuration option. - optionally log mount requestor process info. - log mount call arguments if mount_verbose is set. - Fix NFS mount from IPv6 addresses. - make expire remaining log level debug. - allow period following macro in selector value. - fix macro expansion in selector values. - fix typing errors. - Explain /etc/auto.master.d usage. - plus map includes are only allowed in file sources. - Update README. - fix additional typing errors. - update autofs(8) offset map entry update description. - increase group buffer size geometrically. - also use strictexpire for offsets. - remove unused function has_fstab_option(). - remove unused function reverse_mnt_list(). - remove a couple of old debug messages. - fix amd entry memory leak. - fix unlink_mount_tree() not umounting mounts. - use ignore option for offset mounts as well. - add config option for "ignore" mount option - use bit flags for autofs mount types in mnt_list. - use mp instead of path in mnt_list entries. - always use PROC_MOUNTS to make mount lists. - add glibc getmntent_r(). - use local getmntent_r in table_is_mounted(). - refactor unlink_active_mounts() in direct.c. - don't use tree_is_mounted() for mounted checks. - use single unlink_umount_tree() for both direct and indirect mounts. - move unlink_mount_tree() to lib/mounts.c. - use local_getmntent_r() for unlink_mount_tree(). - use local getmntent_r() in get_mnt_list(). - use local getmntent_r() in tree_make_mnt_list(). - fix missing initialization of autofs_point flags. Ian
