Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:17:36 -0500 (EST) From: Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk@MIT.EDU> To: Lawrence Stewart <lstewart@freebsd.org> Cc: "freebsd-fs@freebsd.org" <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org>, Kamil Choudhury <Kamil.Choudhury@anserinae.net> Subject: Re: Distributed, snapshotting, checksumming filesystems for FreeBSD Message-ID: <alpine.GSO.1.10.1202280211140.27539@multics.mit.edu> In-Reply-To: <4F4C5CCB.3050806@freebsd.org> References: <3CEE2DA4348D944399A67E308B78D38A1A57CABA@janus.anserinae.net> <4F4C5CCB.3050806@freebsd.org>
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On Tue, 28 Feb 2012, Lawrence Stewart wrote: > On 02/25/12 15:37, Kamil Choudhury wrote: >> The dream: a file system spread out over a variable, >> ever increasing number of hosts, presenting a single >> unified file system to any client host mounting the >> file system. >> >>> From the client's point of view, it is possible to >> snapshot the directory view that is presented. The >> client also has confidence that data written to the >> file system will be returned exactly as it went in. >> >> Now that I think about it, what I seem to be looking >> for is a network aware ZFS that uses hosts as vdevs. >> >> Is there such a thing out there? > > AFS perhaps? > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAFS > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System > > /usr/ports/net/openafs I almost made that suggestion, but decided not to, given that the present implementation only allows administrators to make snapshots, and I don't think any checksumming would be quite what was described. (One could certainly use a ZFS partition for the fileserver backing store, which would give some checksum functionality, but it would not be exposed to users in a particularly useful fashion.) But, it does win at having a single unified file system presented to any client mounting it, which is distributed over multiple servers (and data can be shuffled between servers seamlessly). If the OP can compromise in the right directions it might be worth looking at, though, I suppose. I'll also add that the OpenAFS client is not production-ready on FreeBSD; there are some memory leaks and issues with cache eviction for large files that are not yet resolved. Unfortunately there have been a couple of regressions on the git master branch that I need to track down before I can get back to working on the FreeBSD-specific issues. -Ben Kaduk
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