On Jan 3, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Jeff Layton wrote:

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.

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

To add a few more NFSv4 related items:

 - Simplified ID mapping and security configuration
 - Support for NFSv4 migration and replication
 - Better server observability (for operational and performance debugging in the field)
 - FedFS and NFS basic junctions (already under way)

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]
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-- 
Chuck Lever
chuck[dot]lever[at]oracle[dot]com