OpenAFS 1.5.55 released (Production Version for Windows including UNICODE; Test Version for other platforms)

1.5.55 is the recommended production-ready release of OpenAFS for
Microsoft Windows users.  It supports all Microsoft Windows operating
systems from Windows 2000 through Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server
2008 including both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.  The 1.5.55
release continues the recent efforts at optimizing the performance of
the Windows client and improving its scalability.

In the 1.5.55 release of OpenAFS for Windows, each of the AFS Client
Service, the AFS Explorer Shell Extension, and the command-line tools
are UNICODE character set enabled.  No longer is OpenAFS restricted to
accessing file system objects whose names can be represented in the
locale specific OEM code page.  This has significant benefits for end
users.  Most importantly it permits non-Western languages to now be used
for file system object names in AFS from Microsoft Windows operating
systems.  Now that Unicode names are supported, Roaming User Profiles
and Folder Redirection will no longer fail when a user attempts to store
an object with a name that cannot be represented in the OEM code page.

For UNIX, Linux, and MacOS X the recommended production-ready release of
OpenAFS is 1.4.7 and 1.4.8 is currently being packaged for release.  The
1.5.55 Windows client is fully compatible with all AFS server versions.

Please visit http://www.openafs.org/windows.html for up to date
information on the status of the OpenAFS for Windows client.

Windows:

This production release is a major release.  Changes since 1.5.54 include:

 * Fixes a panic caused by corruption of the SMB
   virtual circuit list.  (race condition)

 * Fixes a panic caused by receipt of a UTF-16 string that cannot
   be converted to UTF-8.

 * Implements a more aggressive recovery algorithm for Netbios
   errors that result in loss of communication to the AFS SMB
   server.

 * Improve pioctl response time when testing whether or not a
   PATH is in AFS.

 * Adds support for linked cells.

 * Increases the length of the cell and realm names that can be
   input into the Network Identity Manage AFS provider configuration
   dialog.

Linux:

 * Support for 2.6.28 (not complete for NFS translator modules)

 * Support for using exportfs API for filesystem-agnostic cache.

 * Disable backing store readahead.

 * Avoid deadlocks when writing back mmapped files larger than
   the cache.

 * Avoid Oops when doing PAG garbage collection.

All UNIX client systems:

 * Disconnected AFS avoids infinite recursion during rmdir.

All systems:

 * Salvager avoids leaving core files in vice partitions.

 * NFS translator fixes.

 * Unresponsive server handling fixes.

 * A volserver race which could result in duplicate transactions
   is fixed.

This release is the recommended production release for all
Microsoft Windows environments.

Source code and binaries can be downloaded from

     http://www.openafs.org/windows.html
     http://www.openafs.org/release/openafs-1.5.55.html

Please send reports of successful deployments to
[email protected] and report problems to [email protected].

Jeffrey Altman
for the OpenAFS Gatekeepers