Open source Windows driver for NFSv4.1 released

On its NFSv4 project website, the University of Michigan's Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI) has announced that, after 18 months of development and since the start of September, source code for its Windows driver for distributed file system NFSv4.1 has been available from a Git repository. According to the release notes, compilation requires the Windows Driver Development Kit (WinDDK 6000 or later) and installation of the compiled driver requires a Microsoft test certificate. The included test scripts require a Cygwin environment including the gcc-core, make, sunrpc and time packages.

According to CITI's description of the project, the driver runs on computers running Windows Vista (64-bit), Windows Server 2008 (64-bit) or later versions of Windows and supports NFS version 4.1 as per the recently specified RFC 5661. NFSv4.1 adds key-secured sessions, which improves callback behaviour between server and client when communicating through a firewall. Where servers stripe data across multiple network storage devices, NFS 4.1 is able to accesses that data in parallel via the optional pNFS functionality. The new protocol also improves the placing and removal of file locks via NFS connections and compatibility with Access Control Lists (ACLs) under Windows. In addition to files, it can also now delegate directories and other file types to NFS clients.

Until now, Windows has only included drivers for NFSv3. The only way of marrying Windows machines with NFSv4 servers had been a commercial Windows driver developed by Hummingbird.

(crve)