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Thu, 23 Aug 2007

Distributed storage in Linux Weekly News.

I've finally subscribed to LWN, so right now I'm reading an article. Here is a start:

Evgeniy Polyakov is not an easily discouraged developer. He has been the source of a great deal of interesting kernel code - including a network channels implementation, an asynchronous crypto framework, the kevent subsystem, the "network tree" memory management layer, and the netlink connector code. Of all of those patches, only the netlink connector has made it into the mainline kernel - and that was back in 2005. Undeterred, Evgeniy has come forward with another significant patch set for consideration. His ambitions are no lower this time around: he would like to replace much of the functionality offered by the device mapper, iSCSI, and network block device (NBD) layers. He calls the new subsystem distributed storage, or DST for short. The goal is to allow the creation of high-performance storage networks in a reliable and easy manner.
Jonathan was likely kidding when wrote that :)

As of my projects, entered kernel, I can add that netlink connector code was a 'parent' for generic netlink (genetlink) project, created by Jamal Hadi Salim and Thomas Graf.
And I'm also author and maintainer of Dallas one-wire bus in Linux kernel.
So, yes, sometimes I do generate some interesting ideas, especially if we will not recall kevent project.

That was just to add some clarity :)

As a conclusion, Jonathan writes:
This patch set is clearly in a very early state; quite a bit of work would be required before it would be ready for production use with data that somebody actually cares about. Like all of Evgeniy's patches, DST contains a number of interesting ideas. If the remaining little details can be taken care of, the DST code could eventually reach a point where it is seen as a useful addition to the Linux storage subsystem.
He is right of course, there are number of tasks to be completed for this project, but without interest from other parties (I only say about interest, about discussion of the idea and implementation, and not about anything else), it is quite hard to determine the right direction.
So far TODO list includes:
  • move to per-block data bitmap instead of per-page
  • implement optional saving of mirroring/linear information on the remote nodes
  • implement netlink based setup
  • implement simple security mechanism - like NFS export list (list of IP addresses allowed to connect to given node)
  • new redundancy algorithm (low-prio, since I'm only studing them)
Stay tuned.

/devel/dst :: Link / Comments (2)

grange wrote at 2007-08-24 12:14:

so u're a big star now? (:

Zbr wrote at 2007-08-24 13:22:

Kind of - lwn had several articles about kevent, acrypto, netchannels and connector (iirc) in the past, but they did not have such fun start :)

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