From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ken Hornstein Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:45:38 -0400 Subject: [Lustre-devel] [Twg] Lustre and cross-platform portability In-Reply-To: <5609A4E0-2356-400F-9D53-F71B7007338C@whamcloud.com> Message-ID: <201203151845.q2FIjcXV029439@hedwig.cmf.nrl.navy.mil> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: lustre-devel@lists.lustre.org >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. It was functional in a very basic way but needed some additonal love. Okay, I haven't rolled that stuff into the Whamcloud release ... 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. >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. --Ken