[0/3] POHMELFS: the new release. Extended attributes.

[Evgeniy Polyakov <zbr@ioremap.net>]

Hello.

I'm pleased to announce the new POHMELFS release.

Short changelog:
 * Extended attributes.
 * Distributed locks for metadata updates.
 * Bug fixes and cleanups ( i n c l u d i n g w h i t e s p a c e s ! ).

POHMELFS is a very high performance parallel network filesystem with
local coherent cache of data and metadata. Its main goal is distributed
processing of the data.

Features supported by POHMELFS:
 * Locally coherent cache for data and metadata with (potentially) byte-range locks.
 	Since all Linux filesystems lock the whole inode during writing, algorithm
	is very simlpe and does not use byte-ranges, although they are sent in
	locking messages.
 * Completely async processing of all events (hard and symlinks are the
	only exceptions) including object creation and data reading and
	writing.
 * Flexible object architecture optimized for network processing. Ability
	to create long pathes to object and remove arbitrary huge 
	directories in single network command.
 * High performance is one of the main design goals.
 * Very fast and scalable multithreaded userspace server. Being in
	userspace it works with any underlying filesystem and still is much
	faster than async in-kernel NFS one.
 * Transactions support. Full failover for all operations. Resending
	transactions to different servers on timeout or error.
 * Client is able to switch between different servers (if one goes down,
	client automatically reconnects to second and so on).
 * Client parallel extensions: ability to write to multiple servers and
	balance reading between them.
 * Client dynamical server reconfiguration: ability to add/remove servers
	from working set in run-time.
 * Strong authentification and possible data encryption in network channel.
 * Extended attributes support.

POHMELFS roadmap now includes distributed and parallel facilities of the
server.

1. POHMELFS homepage.
http://www.ioremap.net/node/21

2. POHMELFS archive.
http://www.ioremap.net/archive/pohmelfs/

3. GIT trees.
http://www.ioremap.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi

4. Development status.
http://www.ioremap.net/taxonomy/term/4

-- 
	Evgeniy Polyakov