NFS version 4.0 for FreeBSD-CURRENT

[Zachary Loafman]

First off, I wanted to start by saying something that may interest the
community at large: We (Isilon) recently staffed a small NFS group. Our
intention is to use and extend Rick's awesome effort. We will have three
full-time employees working on producitizing it for us "soon" - by
mid-May all three employees should be working on v4. It is our intention
to give the work back, but we're still trying to work out our
branching/upstreaming model.

I don't know if that affects the timing on this being merged to CURRENT
or not. It might be nice if we had an opportunity to review some things
prior to APIs/VOPs being set in stone, but it would also be nice to get
wider exposure for Rick's code.

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 05:20:20PM -0400, Rick Macklem wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Mar 2009, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> >
> >I think it wise to look at 4.1 and scoping that out before taking
> >the time to integrate this to gain an understanding of:
> NFSv4.1 is still way out there. It hasn't reached RFC stage yet and
> vendors are only testing bits and pieces of it. (The current draft
> of the "minor" revision is over 500 pages.)
> 
> All the code vendors are currently shipping is running 4.0.

I think v4.1 is closer than you might think. We've received numerous
requests for pNFS, and I think many vendors will ship basic 4.1 stacks
this year.

> >1) what it would take to get to 4.1?
> A lot. A required feature is something for handling RPC transport
> called sessions. One guy has been looking at doing sessions for
> FreeBSD (hopefully integrated with Doug Rabson's new RPC code),
> but I have no idea if he has made any progress.

Can you put us in contact? I'd like to avoid duplication of effort here.
 
> >2) how we would interoperate with other machines until we
> >get 4.1 (is everyone doing 4.0 or 4.1?).  When will 4.1 become
> >the defacto standard (is it already?)?
> Systems should still support 4.0 for a long time. I have no idea
> when 4.1 will become a defacto standard, but I'd guess years.

We've idly been considering going 4.1-only given the relatively slow
adoption of 4.0. 4.1 has created a fair amount of buzz and may raise
adoption of 4.x. I can't really say for sure. Nor can I say for sure
what we'd eventually settle on, since the relative cost of 4.0 once you
have 4.1 is fairly small.

> I've tried reading the drafts and got swamped. Honestly, I think a
> 4.1 implementation would take man years of effort and is beyond
> what I am capable of.

I hope we can help. :)

-- 
Zach Loafman | Staff Engineer | Isilon Systems