[Lustre-discuss] [Twg] Lustre and cross-platform portability

Andreas Dilger adilger at whamcloud.com
Thu Mar 15 12:39:43 PDT 2012


On 2012-03-15, at 12:45 PM, Ken Hornstein wrote:
>> I have no information that the WinNT project will ever be released
>> by Oracle, and as yet there has not been any code released from the
>> MacOS port, so the libcfs portability layer is potentially exacting
>> a high cost in code maintenance and complexity (CLIO being a prime
>> example) for no apparent benefit.  Similarly, the liblustre client
>> needs a portability layer for userspace, and suffers from the same
>> apparent lack of interest or users.
> 
> In terms of the MacOS X port, I don't think that's quite fair ...
> the code I did is available and anyone can download it.

Ken, my apologies for this misstatement.  I guess that my faulty memory is to blame for the fact that I didn't recall the MacOS code was made publicly available for download.

>  It was
> functional in a very basic way but needed some additonal love.
> Okay, I haven't rolled that stuff into the Whamcloud release ...

I don't think I've ever seen patches sent from you to either Oracle or Whamcloud, and unfortunately nobody on our side has had the bandwidth or user demand/funding to be pulling such changes either.

> what happened there was when there was all the uncertainty with
> Oracle & Lustre development I lost momentum and got caught up in
> other things.  I've talked with the guys at Whamcloud about bringing
> at least the portability changes over, and that's all been on me;
> it's certainly on my list to work on.
> 
> I can say that at least for MacOS X, there has been interest; I can't
> speak for the amount of interest, and there's a bit of a chicken and
> egg problem ... people don't plan their Lustre use around MacOS X
> clients because there isn't one that works well, and people don't put
> work into it because there isn't people who plan their Lustre use
> around it.

Another alternative that has been proposed is FUSE for MacOS/Solaris.  I'm not sure if FUSE exists for Windows or not.  Of course, this is only useful for casual access, and not for high performance usage.

>> I'd like to get some feedback from the Lustre community about removing
>> the libcfs abstraction entirely, or possibly restructuring it to look
>> like the Linux kernel API, and having the other platforms code against
>> it as a Linux portability layer, like ZFS on Linux uses the Solaris
>> Portability Layer (SPL) to avoid changing the core ZFS code.  A related
>> topic is whether it would be better to replace all cfs_* functions with
>> standard Linux kernel functions en-masse, or migrate away from cfs_*
>> functions slowly?
> 
> The only thing I can think of is that if this is done, then officially
> Lustre is going to be a Linux-only filesystem.  I understand there are
> real costs to maintaining the cfs layer, and I can't speak to whether or
> not the loss would be worth the gains.

This isn't strictly correct.  It would be possible to change the libcfs portability layer to export the same API as the Linux kernel to MacOS and Windows.  This would simplify getting the client into the Linux kernel, but still allow a native client on MacOS.

I'm fine with keeping the abstraction layer if there is legitimate use for it.  Having the MacOS client in the Lustre tree in a state where it can at least be built would allow us to make changes to the code (e.g. function renaming) with some chance of it not being totally broken immediately.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger                       Whamcloud, Inc.
Principal Lustre Engineer            http://www.whamcloud.com/







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