Hello. This is a new release of the POHMEL filesystem. POHMELFS stands for Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System. This is a high performance network filesystem with local coherent cache of data and metadata. Its main goal is distributed parallel processing of data. Network filesystem is a client transport. POHMELFS protocol was proven to be superior to NFS in lots (if not all, then it is in a roadmap) operations [3]. Basic POHMELFS features: * Local coherent cache for data and metadata. (Byte-range) locking. Locks were prepared to be byte-range, but since all Linux filesystems lock the whole inode, it was decided to lock the whole object during writing. Actual messages are being sent for locking/cache coherency protocol are byte-range, but because the whole inode is locked, lock is cached, so range actually is equal to the inode size. One can simultaneously write into the same page via different offsets from different client, and every time file will be coherent on all clients which do it and on the server itself. * Completely async processing of all events (hard and symlinks are the only exceptions) including object creation and data reading and writing. * Flexible object architecture optimized for network processing. Ability to create long pathes to object and remove arbitrary huge directories in single network command. * High performance is one of the main design goals. * Very fast and scalable multithreaded userspace server. Being in userspace it works with any underlying filesystem and still is much faster than async in-kernel NFS one. * Transactions support. Full failover for all operations. Resending transactions to different servers on timeout or error. * Client is able to switch between different servers (if one goes down, client automatically reconnects to second and so on). * Client parallel extensions: ability to write to multiple servers and balance reading between them. * Client dynamic server reconfiguration: ability to add/remove servers from working set in run-time. * Strong authentification and possible data encryption in network channel. * Extended attributes support. * Read-only mounts, ability to limit maximum size of the exported directory. This release brings following features: * Optimize locking commands (combine them with inode information update) * Added root capabilities (split from crypto handshake which settles crypto algorithms used by client and server). This allows to send filesystem statistics from the server. * Read-only and xattrs server extensions. Xattrs processing optimization when they are not supported by server. * bug fixes * extended email documentation Signed-off-by: Evgeniy Polyakov <zbr@xxxxxxxxxxx> 1. POHMELFS homepage http://www.ioremap.net/projects/pohmelfs 2. GIT trees. http://www.ioremap.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi 3. POHMELFS vs NFS benchmarks. http://tservice.net.ru/~s0mbre/blog/devel/fs/2008_06_13_1.html (POHMELFS cbc(aes)+hmac(sha1) vs plain NFS) http://tservice.net.ru/~s0mbre/blog/devel/fs/2008_07_07.html -- 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