On Friday 12 August 2011 08:48 AM, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote: > John Mark Walker<jwalker at gluster.com> 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
