[LSF/MM TOPIC] NFS topics

[LSF/MM TOPIC] NFS topics

[Chuck Lever]

Here are a few ongoing problem areas where I feel it would be
useful to have a group conversation. These are not plenary topics
by any means, but might be interesting as part of a BoF or break-
out session for attendees interested in network file systems.

- NFS performance
Identify common goals, see if there's low-hanging fruit. There are
common issues for Linux's remote filesystem implementations related
to memory allocation, scheduler behavior, and network APIs that would
be useful to discuss. How do we plan to leverage persistent and
storage class memory? What kind of continuous performance engineering
is going on?


- Recovery after temporary or permanent NFS server outages
We discussed this during last year's LSF but the conversation is
not finished. Jeff's writeback error reporting work enables the NFS
client to recover from server outages the same way that local
filesystems might recover from a failed disk. We need the NFS client
to behave better in these scenarios. Indeed, container environments
need this kind of recovery to reduce friction between tenants that
share NFS resources.


- Kernel DNS service
NFSv4 referrals can return a list of server hostnames, or hostnames
that resolve to multiple IP addresses. Our remote filesystem client
implementations handle only a single address in these cases, and that
limits the ability to select the best network path to the server.


--
Chuck Lever