On Friday 12 August 2011 08:48 AM, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:
John Mark Walker<jwalker@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I've CC'd the gluster-devel list in the hopes that someone there can help
you out. However, my understanding is that it will take some significant
porting to get GlusterFS to run in any production capacity on ARM.
What ARM specific problems have been identified?
The biggest issue, IMO, will be that of endianness.
GlusterFS has been run only on Intel/AMD architecture, AFAIK. I have not
heard of any SPARC installations. That means that the code has been
tested only on little-endian architecture. The worst problems come in
when there is interaction between entities of different endianness.
However, there is another side to this. From what I know, ARM is
actually a bi-Endian processor. If the ARM cores have the system control
co-processor, the endianness of the ARM processor can be controlled by
software. So, if we make ARM to work as a little-endian processor, we
should work well even in a mixed environment. But then, ARM is a 32-bit
processor. I am unsure/ignorant of the stability of 32-bit GlusterFS.
If we can solve the two major issues mentioned above viz. Endianness and
stability of GlusterFS on 32-bit, we should theoretically be able to get
GlusterFS working on ARM without any other major work.
Again, I cannot vouch for the above statement. Just my thoughts from
what I know.
Pavan
