On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 10:19:53AM -0500, J. Bruce Fields wrote: > > > (In more detail: they're spreading a single directory across multiple > > > nodes, and encoding a node ID into the cookie they return, so they can > > > tell which node the cookie came from when they get it back.) > > > > > > That works if you assume the cookie is an "offset" bounded above by some > > > measure of the directory size, hence unlikely to ever use the high > > > bits.... > > > > Right, but why wouldn't a nfs export option solave the problem for > > gluster? > > No, gluster is running on ext4 directly. OK, so let me see if I can get this straight. Each local gluster node is running a userspace NFS server, right? Because if it were running a kernel-side NFS server, it would be sufficient to use an nfs export option. A client which mounts a "gluster file system" is also doing this via NFSv3, right? Or are they using their own protocol? If they are using their own protocol, why can't they encode the node ID somewhere else? So this a correct picture of what is going on: /------ GFS Storage / Server #1 GFS Cluster NFS V3 GFS Cluster -- NFS v3 Client <---------> Frontend Server ---------- GFS Storage -- Server #2 \ \------ GFS Storage Server #3 And the reason why it needs to use the high bits is because when it needs to coalesce the results from each GFS Storage Server to the GFS Cluster client? The other thing that I'd note is that the readdir cookie has been 64-bit since NFSv3, which was released in June ***1995***. And the explicit, stated purpose of making it be a 64-bit value (as stated in RFC 1813) was to reduce interoperability problems. If that were the case, are you telling me that Sun (who has traditionally been pretty good worrying about interoperability concerns, and in fact employed the editors of RFC 1813) didn't get this right? This seems quite.... surprising to me. I thought this was the whole point of the various NFS interoperability testing done at Connectathon, for which Sun was a major sponsor?!? No one noticed?!? - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html