ANNOUNCE: ScoutFS archival filesystem code published

ANNOUNCE: ScoutFS archival filesystem code published

[Zach Brown]

Greetings -fsdevel,

Today we at Versity are opening the code to ScoutFS, the clustered file
system that we've been developing as part of our larger software stack
that supports large scale archives.

The motivation for the project and the architectural decisions that
we've made can be found in the white paper that is linked off of
https://www.scoutfs.org/ .   We've also set up a
scoutfs-devel@scoutfs.org development mailing list and have an open
Slack channel, both are linked off of the scoutfs.org site.

The README.md in the kernel module github repo at
https://github.com/versity/scoutfs-kmod-dev/ describes the quick steps
needed to get a system up and running.

For the expert audience, here's the overview of the project:

 - Clustered file system using a shared block device.
 - Shared LSM indexing of metadata to encourage concurrent updates.
 - Integrated archival interfaces (indexing, "offline" extent tracking).
 - Batch locking to reduce the cost of enforcing full POSIX.
 - Initial development targets RHEL/CentOS kernels.
 - What you'd expect: atomic transactions, metadata checksums, extents.

This code can be considered a rough beta.  The large architectural
structures are there for review, and what is implemented has been well
exercised, but a lot remains to be implemented before we declare the
format fixed and submit the code upstream.

We're opening the project early to give the community the opportunity to
contribute to the design and implementation.

In the coming weeks I'll personally be focusing on some big ticket
functional items (deleted inode cleanup in particular),  hardening a few
recovery cases after crashes, and in general spending all of my will
power focusing on that responsible nonsense instead of getting lost in
satisfying performance tuning.

Ask me anything :),

- z

Re: ANNOUNCE: ScoutFS archival filesystem code published

[Darrick J. Wong]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 12:23:03PM -0700, Zach Brown wrote:
> Greetings -fsdevel,
> 
> Today we at Versity are opening the code to ScoutFS, the clustered file
> system that we've been developing as part of our larger software stack
> that supports large scale archives.
> 
> The motivation for the project and the architectural decisions that
> we've made can be found in the white paper that is linked off of
> https://www.scoutfs.org/ .   We've also set up a
> scoutfs-devel@scoutfs.org development mailing list and have an open
> Slack channel, both are linked off of the scoutfs.org site.
> 
> The README.md in the kernel module github repo at
> https://github.com/versity/scoutfs-kmod-dev/ describes the quick steps
> needed to get a system up and running.
> 
> For the expert audience, here's the overview of the project:
> 
>  - Clustered file system using a shared block device.
>  - Shared LSM indexing of metadata to encourage concurrent updates.
>  - Integrated archival interfaces (indexing, "offline" extent tracking).
>  - Batch locking to reduce the cost of enforcing full POSIX.
>  - Initial development targets RHEL/CentOS kernels.
>  - What you'd expect: atomic transactions, metadata checksums, extents.
> 
> This code can be considered a rough beta.  The large architectural
> structures are there for review, and what is implemented has been well
> exercised, but a lot remains to be implemented before we declare the
> format fixed and submit the code upstream.
> 
> We're opening the project early to give the community the opportunity to
> contribute to the design and implementation.
> 
> In the coming weeks I'll personally be focusing on some big ticket
> functional items (deleted inode cleanup in particular),  hardening a few
> recovery cases after crashes, and in general spending all of my will
> power focusing on that responsible nonsense instead of getting lost in
> satisfying performance tuning.
> 
> Ask me anything :),

Is there a fsck tool for this? :D

--D

> - z

Re: ANNOUNCE: ScoutFS archival filesystem code published

[Zach Brown]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 04:06:49PM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 12:23:03PM -0700, Zach Brown wrote:
> > 
> > Ask me anything :),
> 
> Is there a fsck tool for this? :D

Not yet, it's early days :)

- z

Re: ANNOUNCE: ScoutFS archival filesystem code published

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 12:23:03PM -0700, Zach Brown wrote:
> In the coming weeks I'll personally be focusing on some big ticket
> functional items (deleted inode cleanup in particular),  hardening a few
> recovery cases after crashes, and in general spending all of my will
> power focusing on that responsible nonsense instead of getting lost in
> satisfying performance tuning.
> 
> Ask me anything :),

How well does it survive xfstests?  ;-)

Re: ANNOUNCE: ScoutFS archival filesystem code published

[Zach Brown]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 02:42:08PM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 12:23:03PM -0700, Zach Brown wrote:
> > In the coming weeks I'll personally be focusing on some big ticket
> > functional items (deleted inode cleanup in particular),  hardening a few
> > recovery cases after crashes, and in general spending all of my will
> > power focusing on that responsible nonsense instead of getting lost in
> > satisfying performance tuning.
> >
> > Ask me anything :),
> 
> How well does it survive xfstests?  ;-)

Pretty well?  It certainly doesn't run a lot of the tests because
features aren't there yet, but it does well at what it does run :).

Not surprisingly, it's been our test platform as we've been developing.
We have a branch that adds some cluster awareness and scoutfs tests.
Cleaning up that branch and making the repo public is high on my list.

- z

Re: ANNOUNCE: ScoutFS archival filesystem code published

[Richard Weinberger]

Zach,

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 9:24 PM Zach Brown <zab@zabbo.net> wrote:
> In the coming weeks I'll personally be focusing on some big ticket
> functional items (deleted inode cleanup in particular),  hardening a few
> recovery cases after crashes, and in general spending all of my will
> power focusing on that responsible nonsense instead of getting lost in
> satisfying performance tuning.
>
> Ask me anything :),

Is encryption planned?
Both storage and transport.

-- 
Thanks,
//richard

Re: ANNOUNCE: ScoutFS archival filesystem code published

[Zach Brown]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 08:22:25AM +0200, Richard Weinberger wrote:
> Zach,
> 
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 9:24 PM Zach Brown <zab@zabbo.net> wrote:
> > In the coming weeks I'll personally be focusing on some big ticket
> > functional items (deleted inode cleanup in particular),  hardening a few
> > recovery cases after crashes, and in general spending all of my will
> > power focusing on that responsible nonsense instead of getting lost in
> > satisfying performance tuning.
> >
> > Ask me anything :),
> 
> Is encryption planned?
> Both storage and transport.

Not specifically planned, no, but I'm receptive to adding it --
particularly to support finer granularity key contexts (not just fs
mount wide :/).

- z