Hi Matt. On Sun, Dec 02, 2007 at 10:50:59PM -0600, Matt Mackall (mpm@xxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > Distributed storage documentation. > > > > Algorithms used in the system, userspace interfaces > > (sysfs dirs and files), design and implementation details > > are described here. > > Can you give us a summary of how this differs from using device mapper > with NBD? >From the higher point ov view it does not, but it operates quite differently: it has async processing of the requests, thus not blocking, it has different protocol with smaller overhead, supports strong checksums, has in-kernel export server, which supports simple security attributes (i.e. allow to connect, to read or write). It uses smaller amount of memory (zero additional allocations in the common path for linear mapping, not including network allocations, it uses smaller amount of additional allocations for mirroring case). DST supports failure recovery in case of dropped connection (core will reconnect to the remote node when it is ready), thus it is possible to turn off and on remote nodes without special administration steps. DST has simple autoconfiguration at the startup time (support checksums and storage size autonegotiation). It is possible to turn one of the mirror nodes off and use it as a offline backup, since dst mirror node stores data at the end of the storage, so it can be mounted locally. -- Evgeniy Polyakov - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
