[Fwd: Re: Lab to sample Linux for weapons work]

[Ronald G Minnich]

On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Gregg C Levine wrote:

> Ron, about the v9fs project. I am impressed. It looks like a good
> project. I might even try the code in any of my projects. So? What did
> kill NFS for clusters? Just for fun, try the v9fs in the first cluster
> that starts life at your shop.

thanks.

NFS has a fundamental assumptions that causes endless trouble.  The
assumption is statelessness. This means that servers and clients can
restart any time. But for performance, true stateless operation is never
practiced, and then you have to add timeouts for inode data, and the whole
thing starts to look like a giant collection of rubber bands, glue, and
paper clips.

Basically if you look hard at NFS all the bad problems flow from this
assumption. This has been written up to death over the last decade, and
we're finally able to move away from NFS as it does not seem fixable for
clusters.

We are testing v9fs on clusters now. It works and with 2.4.19 and its own
private name space support it is really nice.

ron