Hello from IOCELL Networks,
This summer we purchased the NDAS storage technology rights and patents
from Ximeta. We are now looking to open development of the NDAS driver
in Linux.
So I found this group and now look for your help and advice. I thought
to go the "project admin / company" route, but Greg KH let me know the
development list is better.
Here are some announcements of our acquisition:
http://www.iocellnetworks.com/neo/index.php/press.
According to the questions on the foswiki company project page, here is
a brief summary of where NDAS is for Linux.
* What type of device you wish to have supported.
We need the driver that will work with the latest kernel on our
single and 2 bay NDAS devices. The current driver supports connecting
SATA and IDE, or ATAPI drives to the LAN by Ethernet. It has a read
only, exclusive write, and shared-write mode. Shared write must be used
with a multi-user filesystem. Professional development stopped in summer
2008. The last official release works with Kernel 2.6.24. Some NDAS
Device owners submitted patches to the driver that kept it running up
until Kernel 2.6.34 or so.
* Summary of technical specs that you have for your device.
We have the original source code. The documentation is very minimal.
The drive has been exported and compiled on x86, x64, mips, and arm
processors.
This is basically the same idea as Linux's Network Block Device,
and Coraid's AOE. There are kernel modules that load when the driver is
activated, and there is a user level tool that allows interaction,
enabling and disabling the device. Once enabled, the user mounts the
drive like any other internal disk. The NDAS system uses Ximeta's own
LAN protocol, LPX, which is also available, but seems not to be part of
any bug at this time.
Many parts of the source code are GPL.
Ximeta released a binary part though, so I don't know if that
should be maintained or not. Some users who patched it in the past
requested that Ximeta at least allow them access to the binary sections,
but were never accomodated. We are making all the source code available
to any development. We will need your advice about this part.
* If your company requires an NDA to be signed to get access to the
specifications for this device.
The windows and mac drivers are slated to remain proprietary. So I
think an NDA would be needed if developmers require access to those
sources in order to keep the Linux driver communicating with the other OS.
Communication basically amounts to notification whether the NDAS
device can be mounted read / write or not, and gives the admin a chance
to request write access from other computers.
* Anything else you think that the project managers will find helpful in
trying to determine the amount of effort that will be needed to support
this device.
Bugs?
The major bug that we have now is that multiple devices do not load
the disks correctly. If I mount two NDAS Devices to the computer, the
disks have the same block id. The problem seems that the request queue
does not increment correctly.
The lesser bug is simply updating the block methods to match the
current kernel. The big kernel lock must be take out of our driver.
Future?
The kernel modules must keep up with the Linux Kernel, and we would
like to allow routers and plug computer users and other low power type
devices to gain better access to the NDAS devices, especially media
players and such.
Links?
http://linux.iocellnetworks.com - the last released code, the
patches submitted by users, and the posting about opening development.
http://ndas4linux.iocellnetworks.com/ - the code.ximeta.com trac
page which has the discussions and bugs that were patched by the users.
Thanks for any help. We will answer any questions about the driver or
any other NDAS questions as soon as possible.
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