Lisa Week's Weblog

NFSv3 and NFSv4 Server Providers Delivered

In the past couple of months, when I have not been heads-down on pNFS, I have helped Sam and Adam with the DTrace Providers for NFS. Our focus for this round of work was on the server side providers and we are happy to report that the NFSv4 server provider was putback to Solaris Nevada build 80 and the NFSv3 server provider was putback to Solaris Nevada build 84.

Follow-on work will include providers for the client side (NFSv3 and NFSv4) as well as both the NFSv4.1 client and server. Currently, we don't have any dates for when you can expect the follow-on work to start up, but keep checking the project page for updates.

What does a DTrace Provider for NFS do for you?

Having DTrace providers for NFS allows us to use DTrace to trace the NFS activity on a system. It makes probes available at the start and finish of every NFS over-the-wire operation. This gives users a very powerful method of collecting information about NFS usage (e.g. how many and which operations were executed, how long did the operation take, etc.) And, for someone like me, a NFS developer, it provides a great debugging tool. Instead of having to use snoop to capture NFS activity and separately using DTrace probes (usually sdt or fbt) to see what is going on in the kernel, we can use DTrace from end to end.

Examples and documentation

For some examples on how to use the providers check out the NFSv3 and NFSv4 provider documentation on the DTrace wiki.