So we had our first BakeAThon hosted by NetApp. I thought it went very well and it enabled the NetApp folks to see how much work goes into hosting the event.

I can't go into details that involves other vendors, because of a NDA, but I can say that we did a lot of testing on new features in both the client and the server. I'm not that familiar with the client side changes, I think we had the compound constructor changes by Bob Mastors and Karen Rochford was testing a rewrite of the layout handling code.

I was more excited about the changes on the server side:

• Rob Thurlow had added Proxy I/O, which allows a nfsv4.1 client to talk to our pNFS client. I.e., you get the sessions code, but not the 'p' -- it isn't parallel. We had tested this internally, but hadn't had a chance to see how other clients fared.
• Jim Wahlig had made some significant changes to how the server does layout recalls and also put in the first pass at persistent layouts.
• Piyush Shivam had added a heartbeat between the DS and the MDS. This allowed the DS to detect that the MDS had rebooted and to re-register with it. If the DS reboots itself, it would automatically handle this condition.
• Lisa Week had implemented the Control Protocol logic for DS_REMOVE. This feature allows a MDS to remove files from a DS.
• Rick Mesta was testing general sessions code changes, including the sa_cachethis implementation.
• Jeff Smith had some code cleanup in place to reorganize our kmod footprint. This was the first of two changes and was the most innocent.
• I had cleaned up the DS_REPORTAVAIL logic and general race cases for when a DS was rebooting whilst under load from the client.
• Plenty of bug fixes and other minor improvements.

I also brought a major rewrite of the layout handling code (allowing for multiple layouts, etc), device handling (allowing multiple datasets on the same DS) and the integration of the kspe (kernel simple policy engine), but I probably needed another week of development/testing on that code.

The other major development is that we are finally making the switch to using Virtual Boxes for our testing needs. We typically would want 3-4 machines per developer. We can refine this by having a pair of public communities (MDS plus 2 DSes). One as the stable system and the other as a sanity test rig. And then each client developer gets their own machine for a client and each server developer gets a community.

Well, with Virtual Boxes working on a wide range of host OSes, we can have the communities hosted on one or two beefier machines, perhaps sharing room with the build server, and each developer can bring up what they need on their laptops.

I'm going to be giving a presentation on July 7th over pNFS at the Oklahoma City OpenSolaris User Group - OKCOSUG. I'd like to give a live demo using virtual boxes, but I'm not making any promises...