[Linux-cluster] NFS on GFS architectural issues / problems

[Wendy Cheng]

Riaan van Niekerk wrote:

>
> My question to you or anyone who is familiar with NFS on GFS, or GFS 
> in general, which of the following are still valid issues for the 
> current (6.1u4) version of GFS. If all or most of them still apply, I 
> can use this as motivation for my customer to strongly consider going 
> off NFS on GFS. Removing the NFS from our GFS cluster has been on the 
> cards for quite a while, but has not gained momentum due to lack of 
> information on the performance gains of such a move (very difficult to 
> gage) or the architectural problems/limitations of NFS on GFS (for 
> which the following extract is spot-on).


These have been worked on and some of them do have test patches ready to 
address the issues. However, the changes are non-trivial and may involve 
base kernel modifiction that we need to get upstream (community linux 
kernel)  acceptance. The efforts take time since we would like to do it 
conservatively to preserve GFS1/2 stability. Unless the posted problems 
have urgent needs (let us know), the current NFS-GFS development focus 
is on failover (Red Hat bugzilla 132823).

Is performance the primary concern you have now ?

-- Wendy