On Tue, Jan 03, 2012 at 02:26:09PM -0500, Jeff Layton wrote: > On Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:59:43 -0500 > Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > One common thing that I see a lot of these days is an increasing number of > > platforms that are built on our stack as storage servers. Ranging from the > > common linux based storage/NAS devices up to various distributed systems. > > Almost all of them use our common stack - software RAID, LVM, XFS/ext4 and samba. > > > > At last year's SNIA developers conference, it was clear that Microsoft is > > putting a lot of effort into enhancing windows 8 server as a storage server with > > both support for a pNFS server and of course SMB. I think that linux (+samba) is > > ahead of the windows based storage appliances today, but they are putting > > together a very aggressive list of features. > > > > I think that it would be useful and interesting to take a slot at this year's > > LSF to see how we are doing in this space. How large do we need to scale for an > > appliance? What kind of work is needed (support for the copy offload system > > call? better support for out of band notifications like those used in "thinly > > provisioned" SCSI devices? management API's? Ease of use CLI work? SMB2.2 support?). > > > > The goal would be to see what technical gaps we have that need more active > > development in, not just a wish list :) > > > > Ric > > Unfortunately, w/o a wishlist of sorts, it's hard to know what needs > more active development ;). > > While HCH will probably disagree, being able to support more > NFSv4/Windows API features at the VFS layer would make it a lot easier > to do a more unified serving appliance. Right now, both knfsd and samba > track too much info internally, and that makes it very difficult to > serve the same data via multiple protocols. By the way, we could really use a Windows/Samba expert if we're going to discuss that. I don't think their list(s) got the announcement? --b. > > Off the top of my head, my "wishlist" for better NFSv4 serving would be: > > - RichACLs > - Share/Deny mode support on open > - mandatory locking that doesn't rely on weirdo file modes > > It's always going to be hard for us to compete with dedicated > appliances. Where Linux can shine though is in allowing for more > innovative combinations. > > Being able to do active/active NFS serving from clustered filesystems, > for instance is something that we can eventually attain but that would > be harder to do in an appliance. This sort of discussion might also > dovetail with Benny's proposal about pNFS serving. > > -- > Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx> > -- > 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 -- 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
