Ric, et. al.,

I want to think of these questions from the perspective of the storage
systems vendor who is (or may be interested in) using the Linux storage
stack in a product.
  * How do we make things easy for those vendors (without compromising
    the licensing--theirs and ours)?
  * How do we ensure that they have all of the features that they need,
    and can add their own software "skin" to present to the end-user?

We have talked about some of these issues already, and I know that there is
work being done, but the key will be to make that work consistent so that we
are not reinventing wheels but also not forcing customers to use this or
that specific piece or part.

I think we want to look at our storage stack from the bottom up, and
consider what can be done within the kernel and/or in user-space to bring
the pieces together.

Okay... so all of that is wildly vague and magic-waving-of-hands-ish.  The
questions raised in the thread below require a bit of thought to answer.

Chris -)-----

Ric Wheeler wrote:

On 01/24/2012 04:36 PM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Jan 03, 2012 at 02:26:09PM -0500, Jeff Layton wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:59:43 -0500
Ric Wheeler[off-list ref]  wrote:

quoted

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.

Adding in three windows/samba people that I know of :)

Ric

quoted

quoted

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[off-list ref]
-- 
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe
linux-fsdevel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh@ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/    -)-----   crh@ubiqx.org