Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2016 17:37:57 -0400 (EDT) From: Rick Macklem <rmacklem@uoguelph.ca> To: freebsd-fs <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org> Subject: pNFS server for testing (alpha test stage) Message-ID: <194021987.63592678.1460669877291.JavaMail.zimbra@uoguelph.ca>
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Hi, I've been working on a pNFS server for FreeBSD over the last few months and it is now at what I would consider alpha test. One thing I know is currently broken is appending to files (which sometimes get truncated). I'm sure there are lots of others. The dream is that someday this will allow a FreeBSD NFS service to scale beyond what a single server configuration can handle. Performance could be described as slow->very slow with the exception of reading/writing, which works at wire speed on my slow hardware (100Mbit/sec). Hopefully some of this will be resolved over time, but I'd guess that things like file creation will always be slow compared to doing NFS against a file system like ZFS. I will continue to work on it and update the project on svn but, to be honest, it won't go much further unless others jump "on the bandwagon" to do testing on larger hardware configurations than I have. Essentially this server consists of a GlusterFS cluster and uses GlusterFS's NFSv3 server to implement the data server component (read/write of files). Since the NFSv3 Read/Write RPCs are directed to the system in the GlusterFS cluster that the file exists on, it is hoped that this will scale. Multiple metadata servers (NFSv4.1 servers that do everything except reading/writing) may be possible, but that is a ways off. At this time I have only tested against the modified NFSv4.1 client in the projects area for FreeBSD. I hope to start testing against a Linux client sometime soon. (It uses a pNFS layout scheme called "Flexible File Layout" which is still at the internet draft stage.) Anyhow, if anyone is interested in testing this, I have a primitive document at: http://people.freebsd.org/~rmacklem/pnfs-setup.txt that will hopefully give you a starting point and, as this file notes, the modified sources are in FreeBSD's subversion repository in base/projects/pnfs-server. Have fun with it, if you try it, rick
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