Re: v9fs (-mm -> 2.6.13 merge status)

Eric Van Hensbergen
2005-06-21T13:52:29Z

On 6/21/05, Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> wrote:
>
> v9fs
>
> I'm not sure that this has a sufficiently high
> usefulness-to-maintenance-cost ratio.
>

I think v9fs/9P has some unique aspects which differentiate it from
the other distributed system protocols integrated into Linux:
a) it presents a unified distributed resource sharing protocol. It
will be able to distribute devices, file systems, system services, and
application interfaces.
b) it provides non-caching RPC-style access to synthetic file systems
which could be used with in-kernel file systems such as sysfs or with
user-space synthetics such as those provided by FUSE
c) its implementation supports transport independence enabling easy
support for different interconnects (shared memory, Xen device
channels, RDMA, Infiniband, etc.)

v9fs-2.0 has a somewhat limited audience at the moment - but now that
the initial implementation is more or less complete we are working to
build applications on top of it (and provide a better server). It's
being integrated into cluster projects at LANL and being looked at wrt
virtualization I/O at IBM. Its our hope that these improvements and
cluster applications will motivate more wide-spread use of the v9fs
module.

-eric