Don Traub's Weblog NFS-R-Us

Coffee, the 5th major food group

Riddle me this, Batman:

Q: What do you get when you mix a manager with a Peet's 4-shot latte right after a brisk morning run at the gym?
A: 2 blogs in one day!!

Actually, guilt took over, as it's been way too long since I've posted. SoOOOOOOooooo, what's new in NFS and CIFS land? Lots! Pour yourself a hot cup of joe, and read on...

We've fired up several new OpenSolaris projects:

• NFS Server in non-Global Zones - We just fired up this project, with the intent of seeking input on what the use-cases are for supporting this. This work is not staffed, but if there's engineering resources within the community that would like to pick this up, let us know!
• NFSv4 Namespace Extensions - This project delivers Mirror Mounts and Referrals. We have working prototypes, that we tested at Connectathon '07. We'll be posting a requirements doc shortly to prompt discussion and communicate progress.

And, we have made tremendous progress on many others:

• NFS RDMA transport update and performance analysis - This project will update the OpenSolaris implementation of RPC for infiniband transports. The work is being done primiarily by students at Ohio State University. This is an excellent example of the community contributing to OpenSolaris. OSU has made great progress, and we're working with them to get this work delivered this Spring. Watch the project page for further developments.
• Sharemgr - This wasn't an OpenSolaris project, but we recently delivered into build 53 of Nevada. It delivers a much-improved and greatly simplified administrative model for managing NFS shares. Check out Doug McCallum's blog for details.
• In-kernel Sharetab - While also not an OpenSolaris project, Tom Haynes's blog discusses the details of this work, which just went into Nevada. This is one more step in simplifying Solaris administration.
• NFSv4.1 pNFS - This project delivers an implementation of pNFS, which is coming out of the NFSv4 IETF Working Group The specification is nearing completion. We have a prototype implementation today, which we recently tested at Connectathon. Watch the OpenSolaris project page, as we'll be updating it shortly with documentation and prototype code.
• CIFS Client - This project will create a virtual filesystem for Solaris to provide a CIFS/SMB client which can connect to machines exporting CIFS/SMB shares. We have many operations working, and expect to deliver this into Nevada this summer, with hopes to backport to a Solaris 10 Update shortly thereafter. We'll be posting the latest bits on the project page shortly, so grab them, kick the tires, and let us know what you think.
• Dtrace Provider for NFS - This project introduces a new DTrace provider that instruments NFSv4 clients and servers. The probes and their arguments represent the NFSv4 protocol. Not much progress on this over the last few months, but we're getting some engineering resources back onto this to crank this out.

And what about bugs? Yea, there is always some, it's the nature of the business. We keyword bugs with oss-bite-size when we think the bug is a great candidate for someone in the community to run with. Grabbing one of these is a great way to learn the code base, along with the people and processes involved. Come on, dive in, the water's great!

That's all for now. Tune in next time for my next caffeine rush. C'ya.

Posted at 10:56AM Apr 05, 2007 by Don Traub in General  |