[Lustre-devel] SAM-QFS, ADM, and Lustre HSM

[Nathaniel Rutman <Nathan.Rutman@Sun.COM>]

LEIBOVICI Thomas wrote:
> At CEA, we are using our own copytool that directly uses HPSS API. 
> This already exists and is in production for years.
> I think there will be few modifications to adapt it to Lustre-HSM purpose
> (basically, add fid <-> HSM id mapping and backup of attributes, path, 
> stripe...)
So then the QFS copytool will indeed be a new tool, and should be 
scheduled accordingly.
Features:
1. "cp --preserve" like functionality (include metadata attributes in cp)
2. add EA's (create mini-tarball)
3. implement FID hash to subdivide namespace
4. periodic status reporting (via ioctl on file)


Harriet G. Coverston wrote:
>> There is a mechanism to get the current full pathname for a given fid 
>> from userspace, so an HSM-specific copytool could find it out, but a 
>> central tenet of the design here is that as far as the HSM is 
>> concerned, the entire Lustre FS is a flat namespace of FIDs.
>
> Be careful here. We are a file system. We don't have a limit on # of 
> files in one directory, but we don't recommend more than 500,000 files 
> in one single directory or you will start to see some performance 
> problems. You will have to create a tree, not use a flat namespace.
Yes, a tree based on a hash of the fid. 

The other option is to use the actual filename for storage, but from 
Lustre's point of view this gets extremely tricky.  For example:
Send /foo/bar to archive.  Client A opens /foo/bar.  Client B renames 
/foo/bar to /abc/xyz, but this change hasn't propagated to the archive 
yet.  Client A now tries to read its open file handle, which tells 
Lustre to read the offline file FID 123, which it translates to /abc/xyz 
currently, which the archive doesn't know about yet.  Not just xyz, but 
renames on any ancestor path element cause similar misses.  Since the 
FID remains constant throughout the life of a file, we don't have to 
worry about any namespace changes (file or parents).  If there was an 
alternate way of bypassing the archive's namespace to directly access a 
file, we could conceivably store e.g. an archive-specific identifier 
within the Lustre stripe EA, and pass this down to the copytool when 
reading an offline file, but this presupposes that such a thing exists, 
is of reasonable size, has a userspace method to access it, etc.

>
>>  You can get a full pathname if you want to for catastrophe recovery, 
>> but Lustre itself will only speak to the HSM with FIDs.
>> As I said in the other email, although SAM-QFS can do name-based 
>> policies, the "name" as far as QFS is concerned is just the FID, so  
>> name-based policies at the copytool level are worthless.   Unless we 
>> a.) add the path/filename back to the file (EA, or use a tarball 
>> wrapper), and b.) modify the SAM policy engine to use the "real" 
>> path/filename instead of the FID.
>
> Currently, we don't support policy using EA (extended attributes are 
> in 5.0). We have had lots of requests for this, especially from our 
> digital preservation customers.
Ah, policy based on EAs would be the general case, yes.